Number in Series: Eighth

Healing In Community Through Jesus

Mark 2:1-12 New International Version

Jesus Forgives and Heals a Paralyzed Man

2 A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home.

2 They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them.

3 Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.

4 Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.

5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

6 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves,

7 “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things?

9 Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’?

10 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the man,

11 “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”

12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”

I was sitting at my desk in the office one day. It was a time before open concept office layout became cool. So not here, years, a decade ago, at my prior place of employment. You know the cubicles that you can look over when you stand up, but in your own world when you sit down. And sometimes we’d have random over the cubicle conversations, without even looking up. Someone would make a sound, we’d chuckle and carry on. Listen to and hear everything that happens from our own individual desks. 

There was this one guy I never really liked, who sat three cubicles over from me. We were both interns at the church, Associates we’d call it, maybe he was one year ahead of me. You can kind of get the vibe of the church office culture from that. He’s the kind of guy that would say things like,

“As an economist in my former life…”

He was an econ major in college and worked like a year in consulting I think. I also worked for a year after college in political campaigns before seminary but I don’t go around calling myself a political strategist in my former life. 

That day, we were talking about some new pop song that came out, maybe it was a kpop song. I chimed in and said, yeah it’s a kpop song. And the guy, that I didn’t like, says,

“what even is the difference between kpop and jpop? Cause they sound the same.”

One could say it’s a harmless comment. He just didn’t know. But to me, it was offensive. Because it brought up for me all the times when I felt invisible and unseen. When guys holler “konichiwa” or “nihao” to me on the street because they can’t even catcall correctly. When people would ask me,

“Are you Japanese or Chinese?”

and I’d say,

I’m Korean. 

And then they’d say,

“South or North”?

Like they’d been there or know anything about the difference.  I’ve heard lately people say in response,

“where are you from?”

and if someone says,

“America.”

you say,

“North or South?” 

It’s ignorance. It’s just that sometimes we don’t know. It’s aggravating in one sense but also, I used to say, well I don’t really know the difference between the French and the German. 

Look, we’re all ignorant people in so many ways. I think sometimes in the intellectually liberal circles, we’re even worse about what is offensive. Well no, that’s not true. Saying the wrong thing will get you excommunicated and cancelled in the liberal circles, but a trans person just existing without even having said anything in some circles will get you that invisible unseen feeling for sure, or much worse. 

How are we supposed to put up with one another? 

The politically divided, the ignorant co-worker, the microaggression, the difference in culture that causes stress and offense. Things ranging from minor agitation to hurtful even violence toward one another because of our difference, that causes harm, even death. How are we supposed to live together? 

We’ve been talking about healing in our sermon series and I wanted to talk about healing in the context of community and relationships. Because sometimes it feels like there’s more hurt, pain, and offense when we are in a relationship with one another, especially when we’re in a relationship with a “difficult” one. 

That co-worker I really didn’t like, that’s just one story. I had to work on a project with him at some point, and one day we had a huge confrontation. All my built up anger toward him was triggered that day, when we started arguing about diversity. After that difficult conversation, a week later, I went to the dentist for a filling. She told me to come back if the bite wasn’t correct, they’d file down the filling if it was bothering me. For days, it bothered me. I went back in, convinced that the filling was giving me pain in my jaw. She looked at it. She said it looked fine. I tapped my teeth. It still felt like something was off. And then she asked me,

“Have you had any stress in the last week or two?”

I was like,

“Um I mean, work is always stressful (strung out laugh)!”

But I was immediately thinking about my confrontation with that guy. 

In an attempt to heal, sometimes our first line of defense is, just cut him out of my life. He is toxic. It’s a toxic work environment. He’s literally causing me physical pain! I’m supposed to buy a $300 retainer and wear it every night so I don’t clinch my jaw–for him? Cause of him? Naw. I’m gonna live a stress free, toxic free life, as soon as he’s out of my life. He’s on my No Fly list. 

Someone right now might be thinking,

“See that’s what’s wrong with cancel culture.”

And I agree with you. 

I want to offer that today’s Bible Story shows us a picture of healing that happened through and because of a community. The healing happened because four friends decided to carry a paralytic man on a mat, and decided to conspire together to break through someone’s roof to get this man healed. 

You see, the action taken by the four men not only practically had the strength to carry the mat or plow through shingles or straw, whatever Ancient Near East roofing material was, but it also showed their faith. Their determination. Their love. 

Mark 2:5  

Look. Verse 5, it says that,

“When Jesus saw THEIR faith” 

That is, the faith of the paralytic and his friends. When Jesus saw all of their faith in action, that’s what it took. 

In our overly individualistic culture, we’ve built this personal relationship with Jesus as the top goal for the gospel, when so much of the Bible is about THEIR faith, OUR faith. Now I don’t know how well these five guys got along. But try carrying anything with three other people okay.

I’m pretty sure, if I remember correctly, that Steve, our senior pastor, and Brian McMurry, Shawn, and my husband Eugene tried to carry our piano into the house from the moving truck, seven years ago when we first moved here. You have to communicate, so as to not hurt anyone in the process. 

I saw a post by Francesca Psychology saying this,

Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager. That means people want a strong community for support, but they are not willing to put in the effort and sacrifice required to be a part of it. Being annoyed is the price we pay for connection and community. It can mean sharing space when it’s inconvenient, showing up when you’d rather stay home, or hosting when you’re tired. Somewhere along the way, our fear of discomfort turned into hyper-independence–strict boundaries, perfect routines, and no interruptions. But when our boundaries become too rigid, they stop protecting us and start isolating us. They become walls. And we wonder why we feel so lonely. We’re paying for convenience with disconnection. We traded the messiness of community for the ease of solitude and lost something vital along the way.” 

You know my algorithm now, chicks into therapy. You see, ideas and wisdom like this is trying to invite us into that community that heals. And how that connection and community isn’t always easy but worth it. The truth is though, the Gospel takes it further. What therapy and psychology attempts to get at a kind of healing and connection, a true holistic healing for everyone calls for not just withstanding annoyance. The kind of healing Jesus offers us goes far beyond self-help notions like,

“so be a villager.”

No, Jesus raises the bar higher and says,

“love your enemies.”

Forgive them. Forgive one another of sins. 

You see, I actually struggled with this concept in these healing stories in the Bible. When this man is paralyzed, he can’t walk. And Jesus says to him,

“Your sins are forgiven.”?

As if it’s because of his sins that he has this ailment? That’s my misunderstood, misused, misinterpreted theology coming at odds with the truth of the message. Because I have heard churches or people tell someone with a very physical condition, even disease like cancer, if only you would pray hard enough, confess a contrite heart of your sins, then Jesus will heal you. And sometimes it doesn’t work out that way and the sick are left with not only the sickness itself but shame and guilt that they could never figure out the right confession to get that miraculous healing. It’s blaming the victim. Some of you might have seen or experienced it too, and think, that’s why I don’t like religion or not sure about prayer or healing or miracles and I don’t blame you. 

Jesus’ power of such holistic healing got translated in a weird transactional theology in which the disease somehow was the consequence of sin. That theology only speaks to the model of a God, a description of God we assume to be one who is transactional, one who punishes in the face of sin, and maybe you’d come to believe in that God so deeply that you have a hard time seeing that God could be any other way. Or that love could be any other way. But let me tell you something, I don’t believe in that God. 

We’ve been taught that God plenty for sure. Here’s how Cole Arthur Riley put it in This Here Flesh. 

“On the day the world began to die, God became a seamstress. This is the moment in the Bible that I wish we talked about more often. When Eve and Adam eat from the tree, and decay and despair begin to creep in, when they learn to hide from their own bodies, when they learn to hide from each other–no one ever told me the story of a God who kneels and makes clothes out of animal skin for them.” 

She goes on to say, 

“I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment… In the garden, when shame had replaced Eve’s and Adam’s dignity, God became a seamstress. He took the skin off of his creation to make something that would allow humans to stand in the presence of their maker and one another again.” 

Isn’t that beautiful? A God who covers us. 

The God that we see in Jesus has always been in the healing and restoration work, with grace and mercy.

  • Grace and mercy for the ignorant.
  • Grace and mercy for the offensive.
  • Grace and mercy even in the face of injustice or racism.

And that’s why I don’t like God sometimes. Jesus is too forgiving for my taste. Or so I say, for everyone else until that forgiveness is bestowed upon me. 

And it is. That radical, even scandalous gracious, merciful forgiveness that Jesus extends to everyone, and he means everyone, from paralytics, paralytics friends, and teachers of the law who criticize him, everyone, he offers that forgiveness to, even you.

  • For all that you have done.
  • For all that you have left undone.
  • For all the things you’ve said.
  • For all the things you left unsaid.

Jesus forgives you and moves toward you in a scandalous way. In all the ways that you’ve left rubble and damage in your tracks, tearing through roofs of communities that you loved, places that were safe and offered healing that in your desperation plowed through with your one longing, your one longing to simply to be seen, accepted, forgiven, and healed. God sees it all and you didn’t mess it up. In fact, it only brought you to the feet of Jesus. And at the gasps of onlookers, at the side eye of those who judged, you are simply loved, healed, and liberated. Wouldn’t it be great if that were true?

Maybe as you walked into this place today, you felt like you were in some ways symbolically tearing through your own hardened heart roofing system. 

Or tearing through the religious institution, the church, because somewhere in there, you wondered, maybe even hoped, that Jesus would be here to greet you. So you came with some friends. 

Or maybe you came alone, wondering, I’m broken, I’m hurting, I can’t walk. And if there anyone, anyone else’s faith beside my own because it is not strong enough, to carry me on a mat to take me to Jesus? Maybe their faith would rub off on me.

I still don’t exactly understand what it means for Jesus to say,

“your sins are forgiven”

to someone who couldn’t walk, and then he could walk. But then again, I also have come to realize a whole lot more about psychosomatic connections, what mere “stress” can do to your body and the truly holistic work of heart, mind, and body is a mystery that science is constantly discovering new understanding on how it all works together. 

I’ll end with this quote from a brilliant book called Disunity in Christ by Christena Cleveland, a social psychologist and public theologian. I find it more interesting than often some Christian books that simply call for unity for unity’s sake, but with a more sophisticated look at our differences and how to overcome them. 

“There I was convinced that I was defending Jesus by condemning Wrong Christians, when I saw that Jesus was beckoning both Right Christian and Wrong Christian and inviting all of us to know more of his heart. As I read through the Gospels, I noticed that he had a habit of connecting with everybody: conservative theologians, liberal theologians, prostitutes, divorcees, children, politicians, people who party hard, military servicemen, women, lepers, ethnic minorities, celebrities, you name it. 

He was pretty serious about connecting, in spite of natural and ideological differences… Rather than using his power to distance himself from us, Jesus uses it to approach us. He follows his own commandment to love your neighbor as yourself–often to his detriment, I might add–by pursuing us with great tenacity in spite of our differences. He jumps a lot of hurdles to reach us.”

A God who pursues us, that is the God we run to and follow.

  • What would it look like for you to know that?
  • That God relentlessly pursues you with love?
  • Would you run to this God? 

Let me pray for us. 

The Coming Storm, Community, and Justice

Today’s guest preacher, international leader in faith-based justice Dr. Drew Hart, explores passages from the book of Isaiah in his message on community and justice. To watch this sermon, click the YouTube video.

Calling of the Sea, The Bewildering Call of God

People sometimes ask me

“how did you decide to become a pastor?”

It’s a big question. I’m always wondering, hmmm, which version do they want? Because as you might guess, it was a series of events that built on one another. It was a season of discernment, of being uncertain, of questioning, of wanting and wondering.

  • Because how can you be sure that you’re being called by God?
  • How does one hear or know this “sense of calling” as they say in the ordained ministry world?
  • How do you hear God’s voice?

This is a question that I’m very curious about, how does one hear or experience God. Even though I have personally experienced it, I’m so curious how others experience it. Like, I want details. When people tell me things like,

“there was a time in my life when I felt really connected to God.”

I’m like, when, how, what did that look like. They’d say,

“Well when I pray…”

and I’d say,

“what time of the day, like on a couch or on a bed? Do you kneel or journal?” 

  • Have you been called by God?
  • Maybe not into ordained ministry but to something?
  • Have you heard from God directly and convincingly, even as it might’ve felt fleeting and mysterious? 

I want to talk about calling today by taking a look at a call story from the Bible, there’s many, but I picked the call story of Mary Magdalene. And I’ll share a piece of my calling experience. And Moana’s, yes the Disney princess. And see if there’s any themes or movements that might help take us through an experience of a calling. What that looks like, feels like. That might even help us recognize not only the big calling for big changes, but even small little gentle callings of God’s holy voice in our everyday lives and how to pay attention, listen, and move through them. 

Let me read for us from the Bible, a story of the calling of Mary Magdalene, not when she first met Jesus but after his death and after his resurrection, when she re-encountered the resurrected Jesus. It comes from

John 20:11-18. 

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look[a] into the tomb;

12 and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.

13 They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’

14 When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

15 Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’

16 Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,[b] ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).

17 Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’

18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

I want to highlight 3 movements that happen in this story that I resonate with, and that I think could often happen in a calling story.

1. Confusion. 2. Recognition. 3. Announcement 

First, confusion. Confusion and also sadness. 

I grew up in the church and there was this thing that many of my friends in my subculture went through. The last night of the youth group retreat when you give your life to Jesus. Trigger warning, as some have mixed experiences of possibly manipulated moments from these kinds of environments – but I mention it because I think some of those experiences also capture and reveal some real felt feelings.

So growing up, our youth group would have a weekend retreat at a retreat center. Through the weekend we’d play games, worship, do skits, just hang out, whatever. But on the last night, we’d all gather around campfire at night, and we’d just sing and sing praise songs in the dark, mixed with prayer from the pastor, and you’d be invited, like an alter call to give your life to God. I always found that it was interesting that we would all end up crying. There was, admittedly, some toxic theology, looking back, about shame, and guilt, and sin, and also I do think (when you really get very very honest with God and with yourself) there is a release of emotions. Of things that you were managing to hold together, like lies you told to your parents, wrong things you’ve done to your friends, or something bad you did even when you knew it was bad to do. On this last night of retreat, you could let it all go, and there’s liberation and lots of tears. 

Mary of Magdalene (by the way Magdalene is not her last name but that’s most likely a description of her origin, Mary from the town of Magdalene), was probably just simply sad because her good friend and teacher had just died. But I did want to point this out because I think that is often sometimes the moment we find God. When we’ve had a great loss, and there’s some open space or room, a need to hear from God. Now I’m not saying we all experience this exactly the same. Again, I’m just using a few stories of Mary, me, Moana, to draw broad strokes to see if it resonates with us. But a state of confusion, filled with sadness sometimes is an opening to a holy moment. 

In my call story, I was also in a time in my life when I felt lost. I was in a new city, San Francisco, moved up there after college for a job, working a job that was grueling and unsure if I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t know many people and felt uncertain about my identity in my mid-twenties. I had not been going to church at the time, probably for a few years, and after feeling somewhat lonely, I decided to check out a church one Sunday morning.

I heard a sermon on the woman with the alabaster jar, a Bible story of another woman, apparently a sinful woman touching and anointing Jesus’ feet with her expensive perfume and her tears. From the beginning of the sermon to the end of that worship service, I soaked my little paper worship bulletin I had held in my lap. I identified myself with the woman, who Jesus said,

“loves much because she has been forgiven much.” 

That Sunday thrust me into a whole season of my life, I think probably about three – four months where I needed to keep connecting with God every night before bed with some scripture reading, journaling, and prayer time. A thing that I grew up calling it “Quiet Times,” when you are supposed to spend quiet time with God every day – that I never did regularly with much shame and guilt for never doing it, like a bad Christian does, that was me. But these months, I did it not out of obligation or duty but because I just needed to make sure and confirm and re-confirm that I in fact had heard God in that one sermon. A devotional book accompanied me through this time called “My Utmost for High Highest” By Oswald Chambers. It had a bible text, a short reflection paragraph for each day of the year and I read every single one. 

On August 5th, it read like this:

Title: The Bewildering Call of God

Scripture text: “…and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished.”…But they understood none of these things… —Luke 18:31, 34

Reflection reads:

God called Jesus Christ to what seemed an absolute disaster. And Jesus Christ called His disciples to see Him put to death, leading every one of them to the place where their hearts were broken. His life was an absolute failure from every standpoint except God’s. But what seemed to be a failure from human’s standpoint was a triumph from God’s standpoint, because God’s purpose is never the same as human’s purpose.

(it continues) This bewildering call of God comes into our lives as well. The call of God can never be understood absolutely or explained externally; it is a call that can only be perceived and understood internally by our true inner-nature. The call of God is like the call of the sea— no one hears it except the person who has the nature of the sea in him. What God calls us to cannot be definitely stated, because His call is simply to be His friend to accomplish His own purposes. Our real test is in truly believing that God knows what He desires. The things that happen do not happen by chance— they happen entirely by the decree of God. God is sovereignly working out His own purposes.

I felt like I understood none of these things. I was a disaster. I was a failure. When I read the words,

“The call of God is like the call of the sea— no one hears it except the person who has the nature of the sea in him.”

I remember my breath both quickening and deepening at the same time. Like you’re trying to swallow something bigger than you’re supposed to. Like looking out to a vast ocean and feeling it all. How the waves both beckon you and scare you at the same time. 

I pictured a sea man on a boat. Free and wild. A little dirty and haggard, and maybe no one else understands why he would choose to live on a boat. But he’s happy. He feels free. 

You know how when you go to the beach with a group, there’s always that one person who jumps into the water? It doesn’t matter if it’s cold or no one else is going in. They have to go in. I’m that person. I don’t know why – I’m not even a good swimmer, and the ocean frankly scares me. But I have to go in. This is how I felt God call me into ministry. 

In the midst of confusion, sadness, all the emotions from guilt to freedom, and then I believe comes a moment of recognition. I love how for Mary, it takes her a while. She sees the angels; she doesn’t get it. She’s weeping, and they’re like,

why are you crying?

And she’s like

I don’t know where Jesus is!

Jesus comes out, she still doesn’t get it. And Jesus is like

why are you weeping,

(there’s a lot of why questions during a calling, okay?) and she’s like,

well if you took him, tell me where he is!

But then, in an instant, Jesus calls her name and she hears it clearly, recognizably, and in that moment she knows. She completely knows. 

In my confusion, some things for very strange reasons felt so very clear. Especially when it didn’t make any sense. It shouldn’t have made any sense, and yet, it made all the sense. Which is how my closest friends and family responded when I first told them that I was going to seminary to become a pastor. The initial confusion, (what?) and then like it all made sense to them, (oh. I see.). I’m not all too sure what that means but I’ll take it. It’s like my life flashed before them and then God covered it with grace right before their eyes. 

And what I loved most about what I read in that August 5th devotional, was that it also was misunderstood by everyone else. It said that it was an internal thing. And it sure was. A lot of guys were confused, how I, a girl, was going to be a pastor. Was I going to seminary to find a husband or to become a Sunday school teacher? When I said no, they were utterly confused. Yeah, I know! Crazy to think! But it was like that back in my day! It was wild and crazy to think a little ‘ol girl could lead or teach or preach or guide people. Wild right? 

And that’s why I love the modern day Disney princess stories of not only falling asleep and waking up to kiss a prince but seeking, venturing, taking action, and going against the tide. The movie Moana made my heart swell. I often get the sudden urge to just run and stop dramatically and sing, “I Am Moana!” I’m pretty sure I’ve done that in another sermon, another illustration right here not too long ago.

Confusion, Recognition, and Announcement.

You see, for Moana too, even as she felt this strong calling, it was often conflicting for her. Her community was confused and her father disagreed with her. She wasn’t sure of herself, why she felt this longing. But there was just something absolutely sure, that she could not deny, she ran back to the water again and again because,

“It CALLLS~~~~ me!” 

And lastly, the other scene I love from Moana is when she discovers the true story of their people, she runs back to her community saying,

“we were voyagers!”

She can’t help herself, the excitement. And so she moved from confusion, to recognition of her calling and then to announcement. Sorry, spoiler alert, they were voyagers.

Mary did this too.

“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.”

But also, right before that, I want to note and point out Jesus saying to her,

“Do not hold onto me.”

Sorry, in my 2nd point, Recognition, there is an addendum I’d like to add. It’s fleeting. The holy voice comes and then it goes. It’s not something you can freeze and lock down and keep in a museum. 

There are many holy moments captured in the Bible. For example, even for the Israelites, there are these big moments when God shows up, like the 10 commandments, but the rest of the stories are all mostly about remembering those moments, because they just keep forgetting and forgetting time and time again. And that’s actually the main story, what we do all those other regular times in our lives when we’re not on the mountain top getting a clear calling from the Lord. 

And so the antidote to that is my 3rd point, announcement.

When you have that moment, even if it came, and went, go and share. Go and talk it out and work it through to see what it did to you and confirm and make sure or refine the experience through your wisdom board, closest friends, or community group. 

And maybe for many of us, it isn’t a moment where Jesus literally called our names. Or one moment even, that we can point to. Maybe it was a series of things that strangely strung together to ignite something in you but you don’t know where it’s going. Like the Christmas song says,

“go tell it on the mountain!”

Go and announce! Go back to your village yelling like a mad woman that just discovered a bunch of old ships. 

Is God calling you? We never would’ve known if Jesus called Mary Magdalene if she didn’t go and tell and tell again and they told someone else and told John and John wrote it down to tell it again and so forth. 

  • What are you hearing from God?
  • Could you tell a friend about something that you’re sensing, or feeling, or hearing in your life to sift through together?
  • Can you go find a sounding board to help you recognize the call of God in your life, and maybe look at you confused at first and then nod with you in recognition? 

Let me end with this. 

The Gottman Institute, the leading research based marriage and relationship experts point to this thing they call “bids” that

“are the building blocks of healthy relationships. They are those meaningful daily endeavors when you invite your partner into your world and ask to enter theirs.”

They can be and often are small things, not grand gestures because it’s easier to say,

“Oh there’s this guy on the bus who brought on the cutest dog ”

which means listen to a small part of my day, rather than saying

“I want to be heard and connected with!” 

Gottman says that when someone offers their bid, and this can be with kids or friends too, when they say something to try to get your attention, you can either ignore it and turn away from it or turn toward it and give it acknowledgement. And that, that creates connection, like you’re on the same side. With my husband it can be as small as, when we’re walking and I notice a flower, a broken brick, or a weird looking car, it honestly could be anything, and I say, “oh look!” and he turns and looks in the same direction that I am looking and sees and notices what I saw and noticed.

It’s small but Gottman studies

“found a critical difference in how masters and disasters respond to bids for connection. In the Love Lab, masters turned towards each other 86% of the time. Disasters turned towards each other only 33% of the time.”

I guess the masters are what they called masters of relationship and disasters. The founder, John Gottman is

“the guy that can predict divorce with over 90% accuracy,”

so… I’ll take note. He also recommends kissing for more than 6 seconds daily for relationships. 

I wonder if God is offering bids to you. And if you are paying attention or turning towards the things that God is trying to point out to you. When you get in the habit of ignoring bids, you don’t even notice that they are trying to offer bids. But be open, see, notice, and listen, and see if God is offering small bids to you this week. Maybe we’re not getting dramatic gestures of God calling our name with a booming voice, and also maybe we’re out of practice. But even if we are, it doesn’t matter.

God will always be offering bid after bid. Even when it feels like everything seems to be going wrong, and there’s great distress and confusion and loss and sadness, listen and look into the tomb for angels. And engage in honest conversations, “why God?”, and when you have a flash of recognition, even if it’s fleeting, go, go and announce it and find a community to talk it through with. I pray that we may have the ears to ear, eyes to see, hearts to feel the great bid and calling from God for our lives. Let me pray for us. 

Community Life and the Death of the Nuclear Family

Grace and I are in this weird moment where we’re finishing up our 22-year old run having a nuclear family at home.

Last weekend was our youngest kid John’s high school graduation. And it was a great weekend. We’re so proud of all three of our kids, and this weekend was a great time to be really proud of our youngest. John’s become an extraordinary human while in high school, and he’s off to great things. What a weekend to celebrate with him! It was a good one.

But it was kind of an emotional weekend too, in what’s been an emotional season, as we sort out the big adjustments going on in our family life. I find myself with complicated feelings about the years ahead – excited about my kids’ chances to try new things, excited for all the freedom I’ll have and that Grace and I will have as a couple. But I find myself kind of introspective and even a little bluesy sometimes too – worried for kids’ futures, sad to not be with them as often, and also just feeling like I need to take a breath and sort out what has happened these past 22 years.

Because they’ve been 22 amazing, awesome years I’m so grateful for. And they’ve also been 22 freaking hard, exhausting years too. We’ve rarely known if we’re doing the right thing or doing enough or too much. And sometimes we’ve looked back and been like what felt like the right thing probably wasn’t. Definitely wasn’t. Our kids tell us this sometimes too. Money was tight, every year. Time and resources of all kinds usually felt tight. It was hard. Harder than I think it needed to be.

A few years ago, the conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a whole article about this that got some buzz. He called it, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” He pointed out that most of the world has lived in extended kinship networks of family and friends, where kids weren’t just raised by one or two beleaguered parents but by the community the family was embedded in. And people who didn’t have kids or whose kids were adults mostly didn’t live alone either, but also as part of communities. Communities of care and connection and accountability. 

But America, since the 1950s, has been running this experiment, where society has kind of centered the nuclear family, like the model for adulthood was to have a spouse and 2.something kids and a dog and have all of your most important relational and economic life happening within that small family unit. All along, though, lots of us were living differently – today, only ⅓ of Americans live in nuclear family households. Only a third of us. Yet if we don’t, we might wonder or people might act like we’re missing out on something. And for the third of us that are doing this, it’s not always working out so well. 

So let’s talk about the failure of the nuclear family, and the communities we all need like bigger families, chosen families, church communities. 

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’ve been rereading the Bible’s stories from the first generation of the history of the church. It’s the book called the Acts of the Apostles. And I’ve been reading it alongside a brilliant contemporary theologian named Willie James Jennings, who’s been helping me see new things in the book of Acts. 

So I’m going to read to you another story from Acts, this one a provocative and troubling one, and we’ll see how it can help us think about the failure of the nuclear family and what can happen in community life.

Acts 4:32-11 (Common English Bible)

32 The community of believers was one in heart and mind. None of them would say, “This is mine!” about any of their possessions, but held everything in common.

33 The apostles continued to bear powerful witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and an abundance of grace was at work among them all.

34 There were no needy persons among them. Those who owned properties or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds from the sales,

35 and place them in the care and under the authority of the apostles. Then it was distributed to anyone who was in need.

36 Joseph, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (that is, “one who encourages”), was a Levite from Cyprus.

37 He owned a field, sold it, brought the money, and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles.

So part one of this story is the idealized picture of church going right. Kind of extreme, like a big commune.. Maybe more intense than most of us would be down for, but I do love the phrase

“an abundance of grace was at work among them all”

and the phrase

“no needy people.”

I feel like we could use abundance of grace and no needy people still.

And it ends with this picture of Joseph, who gets the nickname, the Encouraging One – as a picture of part of how community can work so well. People get a lot out because they’re putting a lot in as well. In this case, giving the full profits of a business sale to the community. 

Then the second half of today’s story, which gets creepy in a bunch of ways.

5 However, a man named Ananias, along with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property.

2 With his wife’s knowledge, he withheld some of the proceeds from the sale. He brought the rest and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles.

3 Peter asked, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has influenced you to lie to the Holy Spirit by withholding some of the proceeds from the sale of your land?

4 Wasn’t that property yours to keep? After you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with whatever you wanted? What made you think of such a thing? You haven’t lied to other people but to God!”

5 When Ananias heard these words, he dropped dead. Everyone who heard this conversation was terrified.

6 Some young men stood up, wrapped up his body, carried him out, and buried him.

7 About three hours later, his wife entered, but she didn’t know what had happened to her husband.

8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, did you and your husband receive this price for the field?”

She responded, “Yes, that’s the amount.”

9 He replied, “How could you scheme with each other to challenge the Lord’s Spirit? Look! The feet of those who buried your husband are at the door. They will carry you out too.”

10 At that very moment, she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men entered and found her dead, they carried her out and buried her with her husband.

11 Trepidation and dread seized the whole church and all who heard what had happened.

So this story is awful. It’s kind of shocking, and offensive, and funny all at once. I mean a man gets caught in his deceit and drops dead in the church. What kind of pastor when his spouse shows up three hours later, not knowing what’s happened, is like:

ahem, I have a question for you. What exactly did you sell your home for last week?

Sorry, it’s so horrible, it’s funny to me. 

And some commentators are like: that’s the point. Author of Acts had a nice sense of gallows humor. It was meant to be kind of outrageous. 

Maybe, but it’s a weird passage. What is the point? Scholars mostly avoid the passage, but when they don’t, they do not agree. 

  • What did Ananias and Sapphira do wrong? 
  • Was it the lying? And if so, was it lying to the leaders? Or was it lying to God? 
  • Or was it the withholding? The holding back a bunch of their funds, while claiming to give them all to the community? 

Scholars will point out that there are similar stories in ancient literature. There’s a Greek story told by Herodotus about a guy who lies about money he kept dishonestly and is then deprived by the gods of descendants as a punishment.

And in the Bible, there’s a more ancient story from the book of Joshua about a time of religious reform, where the community is collecting all the plunder that they were supposed to destroy, and this one guy Achan, or Ay-chan, hides a bunch of silver and gold in his tent, withholding it from the collection, and when they find him out, they take him and his kids and all his animals too, and they stone them to death. 

It’s a set up to a horrible dad joke. The guys’ name was Achan, and it’s like, who’s aching now? 

Some people read this story about Peter and Ananais and Sapphira in light of this Achan story from Joshua, and they approve of the connections. They’re like, look Peter did this miracle of catching people sinning and punishing them. And there are people who have read this story as a justification for church discipline or capital punishment. 

I think that’s horrible, by the way. Even if this story is connected to the old one from Joshua, it’s different in that no one lays a hand on Ananias or Sapphira. Whatever the reason for their death, no person does it. Jesus commanded his followers not to hate, and to regulate their anger, let alone never to kill. The way of Jesus is a resurrection community, a community of the celebration of life. The followers of Jesus are not to participate in death-dealing, period.

Other people connect this story to the Achan one in Joshua by saying it’s a story of divine judgment, and maybe. 

 It kind of seems that way at first. In the Achan story, the writer makes it seem like God is happy and chills out after they stone that guy and all his people and animals. But I think the whole Jewish and Christian prophetic tradition, right through Jesus, has corrected that interpretation. We see the excess now, and the mistakes in people’s thinking about God. I mean one, that guy’s kids, his animals, what did they do wrong? Like who stones some guy’s dog or cow to death, because that guy stole some money from God? No matter what you think about God and violence, that is excessive. Leave the cow alone. 

And I think the arc of scripture, the arc of the Jesus movement, and even the arc of history teach us to not ascribe violence of any kind to God. When I was in Palestine and Israel, I had the honor of meeting Palestinian Archbishop Abuna Chacour, a beautiful Christian leader and bold peacemaker. He says: the first thing we know about God is that God does not kill. 

Jesus was a healer, and it was his enemies that conspired to put him to death. People who follow Jesus ought to be bearing crosses now, not building them. 

So I think there are two bad readings of this passage.

Bad reading one is any reading that justifies violence. That tries to scare people by telling them that God or some person is going to strike them down if they don’t stop whatever. That kind of fear is not worthy of God, or the way or the people of Jesus. Perfect love casts out fear, after all, the scriptures tell us. Perfect love casts out fear. So we shouldn’t try to use fear or threats to try to change people.

And bad reading number two, I think, is to use this story, to try to pressure people to give more money to the church. It’s true that churches and most other good things in life only thrive when we put a lot into them. Reservoir is an engine of generosity and good and innovation for the church in the world, but that only works when we all – the people of the community – put resources in together to make that happen. We need Barnabases who will give generously, give big from what they have. 

All true and good, and many of us love giving to this church, but using this passage or any other threats or manipulation to get people to give more money to the church is toxic. Give abundantly, friends. Give to where your heart is. Give to where you see God. Give to where you see good you want to be part of. But don’t get scared or pressured into giving. 

That’s not the way. There’s even a little hint after this passage, where it says people were kind of impressed by this early church. But they were scared of it too. Because when a community’s leaders abuse power, or when a community spends its energy or its voice stoking fear and exerting control, it’s becoming a cult. It’s lost its health, it’s lost its way. 

Violence and coercion, bad readings. So what is a good reading of this passage? 

Well, Willie James Jennings helped me see something I hadn’t seen before. Which is that it’s really intentional in this story that a couple is doing this. 

Couples aren’t mentioned much in Acts, maybe just two times. Families aren’t the center of the story either. They come up a few times, but the early church wasn’t really a “focus on the family” kind of place. People from all types of family and status were getting involved – single, partnered, young, old, rich, poor, slave, free, and together they were forging new forms of family life together. 

But this couple is interesting. They’re kind of walling themselves off from the community, like God’s big dreams for them are this private story they are working out all by themselves. And they’re just going to pay lip service to other people’s dreams. They also break this whole abundance of grace culture by being inauthentic. They’re going to play along in this community, maybe use the community for their status, looking like they were so generous. But their hearts and their dreams and their finances are really going to be solely tied up in what’s happening inside the walls of their little home. 

Willie James Jennings says they have it backwards. He writes that communities of Jesus say to couples and families: you belong to us. We do not belong to you. 

I find that provocative. And maybe that’s what this passage is about, maybe not. It’s a hard passage. I don’t know. But let’s go with this surprising reading a bit, just for today, and connect it with these thoughts a number of us are having with our failing American experiment in obsession with the nuclear family.

  • What communities are we embedded in? Can we lean on, depend upon?
  • And what communities are we making happen? Are we growing, for us and for others? 

When I look back on my family’s 22-year experiment with the nuclear family, I think it’s gone better when this was our story.

The years where our family has most helped create community, those were good years. When our kids were babies and for years after that, we had people in our home every week – little kids, teens, grownups – every week, we hosted community groups in our homes. 

Where else in our world do people who aren’t related regularly eat together, play together, share together, learning one another’s hopes and dreams and joys and heartaches, learning the names and likes of other people’s kids, talking about the big questions in life about God and love, meaning and morals? I guess there are other places this happens, but not a lot. And church groups at their best – we crush this. 

When we pulled back from this, because we were too busy or other things seemed more important, no one struck us dead, but we lost out.

We lost out because we were meant to make community. 

Mostly, though, I think, our kids got this. It was enough a part of our family that they got it. 

At John’s graduation, a school leader I admire told the graduates that his advice is to be useful. When they don’t know what to do – don’t know how to find their path, where to live, what job or relationship is right, one way to find the path is to wherever you are, be useful. And sometimes the places you find yourself being useful kind of become the path. 

I think that’s a good word. And I think our kids have taken that to heart. You hear it in the way they talk, in the aspirations they have, in the way they show up in the world. I’m so proud of them.

The world does not exist for our sake, not entirely at least. We exist for it too. Our lives and our resources are not just meant for ourselves, they are meant to be invested in things and people and communities outside of ourselves. 

We aren’t meant to be hoarders but givers. 

We also aren’t meant to be alone but together, no needy people among us, practicing abundance of grace. 

The nuclear family ideal is killing us here. Like the only people we’re supposed to be in truly interdependent relationship with is our nuclear kin. For those of us in nuclear families, it’s not enough. And for those of us not in nuclear families at least right now, ourselves are not enough either. 

We need each other. 

The drift of American life doesn’t get us here. It’s hard to sustain deeply connected community. For our family, honestly, this has been a pretty mixed bag these past 22 years. But I think, oh, our best moments haven’t been the cut off ones. I think of the neighbors and the family friends that were at John’s graduation party, and I think – I only wish we’d spent more time together. Because I need things from them and them from me that we don’t have alone. And my kids need things from them, and they need things from my kids too. 

Friends, even in church, this is complicated. As church people, or people trying to be in the Way of Jesus, we too are sometimes more connected to our NetFlix and our Instagrams and our privacy and our nuclear families than we are to others. And we can kind of go back and forth, putting into the common good or not.

And I know community in church can give a lot and sometimes it can disappoint too. My friend T.C. Moore just published a whole book about the limits of nuclear family and the kind of communities and relationships we can make in community. It’s called Forged. And even there, he tells stories of some big successes but of some fails too. So I get that. Even as Acts amidst, church isn’t always the ideal. But it’s one of the best places to keep trying. Really one of the best.

So I wonder if this summer might be a great time for some of us, nuclear family or not, to imagine again what connection and contribution to a bigger community might look like? 

  • Who can you eat with this summer, this fall? 
  • Whose kids that aren’t your own can you get to know?
  • How can you include a couple more people in your private world? How can you let yourself be a little more included in others’? 
  • To what community are you going to give yourself in a big way, not withholding?

Our church is going to provide some opportunities for these things in the months to come, but don’t wait for it. Get started.

Brian McLaren has this book out on the doom we feel is facing us – climate change, politics, all kinds of stuff. It’s bad. 

And he writes:

Love may or may not provide a way through to a solution to our predicament, but it will provide a way forward in our predicament, one step into the unknown at a time. Even if we lose hope for a good outcome, we need not lose hope of being good people. 

We don’t know what the future holds – for any of us, let alone for our country, for our species.

And we don’t know if community will have the answers, or if love will be enough of an answer.

But we know that love will be the way forward. We know that we need each other. And here we are, we’re around. Let’s lean in.

Hearts That Burn

Good morning friends, this Sunday morning or whenever you are tuning in! My name is Cate Nelson, she/her. I lived in Cambridge and worked and worshiped at Reservoir Church for a number of years, and it is a great joy to be back with you all today. 

For those of us that haven’t met, or for folks I haven’t seen in a while, here are some things that I’m enjoying this morning…

This morning we are extending the theme of Fire one more week. Today is a coda to last week’s Easter sermon where Pastor Steve reflected on the story of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to two of his followers along the road to Emmaus. We are spending another week with this story — to expand and stretch it, before Reservoir begins its new series next week on the Wisdom Literature. 

There will be a few moments to have some reflection to check in. 

Grab a match or lighter and candle!

Let’s revisit the scripture we read together last week, as we sink deeper in it today.

This story picks up on the Sunday afternoon after Jesus’ crucifixion…

Luke 24 13:18, 25:32

13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem,

14 and talking with each other about all these things that had happened.

15 While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them,

16 but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

17 And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.

18 Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” 

He goes on to tell a long story of the events leading to Jesus’ crucifixion, how brokenhearted and confused their community is… and how maybe he isn’t in the tomb any more and that angels said he is alive… 

Jesus responds:

“Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!

26 Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”

27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on.

29 But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them.

30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.

31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.

32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 

Let me pray for us as we begin.

The Fellowship of the Burning Hearts

When I was 19, I was interning at a Christian ministry, and part of the internship involved a group Bible study with my fellow interns. It was a three month program, and we had regular classes where we would explore stories and themes of scripture together. In one of our first meetings, our lead teacher took stock of our group and with all this affection in his eyes and conviction in his voice, looked at us and said,

“I’m calling you the Fellowship of the Burning Hearts.” 

He was referencing this passage we just read, where these two men, reflecting on their walk with a person they realize was Jesus, say,

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 

I for one looooooved this name. I wasn’t a Lord of the Rings fan at that stage of my life, but there was something in this name about a merry-band-of-motley-travelers that I adored, as well as the notion we might just find our hearts burning in love for Jesus throughout our experience together. The Fellowship of the Burning Hearts. 

Let’s return to our scripture for a minute. A couple things caught my attention about the burning hearts in our reading today. First:

  • They recognize their burning hearts after the fact. It’s once they’ve recognized him, after he leaves, that they say, “were not our hearts burning within us as he unfolded to us the scriptures…” 
  • Even if they are moved by Jesus’ words, they recognize him in his actions

    : “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him…”

Word and action — their hearts know something as they listen. But they understand something when they see him, when they eat together and he breaks the break — this is Jesus, they say. And that was Jesus, as they see in retrospect that their hearts were alive in a whole new way as they listened to him unfold the story of himself.

When has your heart last been burning?

Can we remember too when our hearts burned within us?

A couple things come to mind for me: 

  • I was at a gathering a few weeks ago, where we all took turns sharing that if we only had one scripture to revisit for the rest of our lives — it would be enough. Just one passage, one chapter, a handful of verses. And as this group spent time going around the circle, reading a passage aloud and saying what it meant to them, and why those words would be enough for a lifetime — I found my heart so tender, so gently glowing with how precious these testimonies, these stories were. 

    • Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty….You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day…

    • In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.. and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

    • You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies, You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 

    • Write the vision; make it plain on tablets. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end and does not lie.

These words filled our room, woven together with stories of mothers’ wisdom and prayers and family dinners, words that sustained people in moments of loneliness, darkness and tragedy… my heart swelled as I listened to these passages that would be enough for the group I was gathered with. For a kid who encountered a good deal of Bible-thumping along the way and sometimes has a spotty relationship with these texts, I was deeply aware that here in this room, as people were unfolding the scriptures to each other, I was in the presence of a

Word that was living and active (Hebrews 4:12).

This is Jesus. My heart burned with love for these people and love for Jesus. 

  • Leaving a boring meeting  — the warmth in my heart from connection afterwards
  • Heart burning from the things in the world we care most about — with rage, with hope

Practice: scan your last few weeks. Was there a time where your heart was burning? Maybe in a moment of connection with God? Maybe in a moment of connection with others? Maybe in awe of a sight in nature, like spring unfolding on the red buds…. Light a candle, remembering your burning heart… giving thanks for that fire within you, perhaps even recognizing Jesus’ presence was in that moment of a burning heart…

Finding our own fellowship this morning of our burning hearts…

Letting this flame burn during our service, as a mark of our fellowship together today. 

Soft Hearts, Burning Hearts

Why this focus on our burning hearts? 

Because the reality is there is so much else that presses upon our hearts…

  • 876 search results for “heart” in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament….

Some of these “heart” results yield words like gladness and rejoicing… and for sure, it is a wonder when we find our hearts tender, joyful, fiery. Quiet joy of contentment or delighted joy are in our own Disney song, dancing among the flowers in awe of the world with little bunnies hopping around us. Goodness knows I love when this is what my heart is like. 

The reality is, life piles up… and with that, troubles, the disillusionment. 

As it turns out, a whole lot more of the search results of these ‘heart” words are things like troubled, broken, hardened. Which really resonates. 

God is well aware of all that goes on in our hearts, how tough it can be… broken hearted, our hearts are troubled, things can be so much. Last week, Steve talked about how life feels so cataclysmic, both in the world and in our own individual lives. The breaking. The aching, the falling apart. All that is unbearable. 

I told you at the beginning of my Fellowship of the Burning Hearts — well this place where I interned has been spectacularly, painfully, catastrophically crumbling in recent months. Heart breaking abuse from a trusted and admired leader leaving people confused, angry, betrayed not to mention leaving some deeply harmed. This place where my heart once burned, now it is breaking, and has left my heart deeply troubled.

  • They stood still, looking sad. How very relatable, this may be one of my new favorite scriptures. And even more, how easy it would have been to say, we are too sad to talk to you — they are after all overcome with grief. Of all the days to have an excuse to say to a stranger, “I’m sorry, I don’t have it in me today, I’ve suffered a great personal loss…” it is this day. But they make a choice to invite him in, and they make a choice to keep walking…

How do we keep moving… to keep walking this road to Emmaus with our grief, our troubles? How do we not stay still in our own sadness, at least not for too long?

I was talking on the phone with a friend who was lovingly listening to me share my litany of heart-sorrows — the mounting pile of troubles and heartbreak. I finished my lament and she wanted to pray for me.

“I am putting my hand on my heart, imagining that Jesus is putting his hand on your heart…”

The tenderness of this brought tears to my eyes as she prayed with love for my troubled heart.

There is a famous scripture in the Hebrew Bible, God tells the Hebrew people:

Ezekiel 36:26

“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” 

This, too, is spoken to a community – just as the burning hearts happen in the context of two followers of Jesus in grieving fellowship along the road. Our burning hearts, our fleshy hearts, are found with Jesus and in the company of others.  

“A new heart I will give you, I will take the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

The truth is, stone can’t burn… a heart of stone cannot burn. So part of the practice of being a people with burning hearts is to be a people of soft hearts… fleshy hearts. Heart of stone for heart of flesh. Can we keep bringing our troubled hearts, our broken hearts into the presence of God and the ones we trust, to say things out loud and to ask for help that our hearts might not calcify? That they may stay fleshy that they can burn with all that makes them alive?

And if our hearts are hard, if they are rocky, may they at least be charcoal, or some other combustible rock that, in due time, can crumble and and burn. And saving that, we do have a God who miraculously can take the hardest places of our hearts and give us a heart of flesh.

Practice: I want to invite you into a moment of reflection, much like my friend invited me into when she prayed for me. If you’d like, place your hand over your heart. Maybe it is a moment to be loving towards yourself. Maybe you imagine it is Jesus’ hand on your heart, close to you in all that troubles or breaks your heart. 

And with your eyes closed or softly landing, take a few breaths just like this, naming before God the things that might hurt so much — or cause you so much worry — or feel like they will never ease. Maybe it’s one thing, maybe it’s a litany of things. Allow yourself to feel Jesus’ love and nearness to the parts of your heart that are troubled, breaking, or aching. 

Can we practice keeping our heart soft and fleshy — not by ignoring the things that hurt, not by trying to solve them on our own, but giving them back to God. This may be pain that we feel in our own lives, pain we see in the world around us… can we keep our hearts fleshy by letting Jesus’ love press upon our hearts — that our hearts may not calcify. 

Maybe we have done this a million times… can we do it once again today. Because the reality is that this is a form a repentance — a form of returning to Jesus again — to say, here it is, my broken heart, my hard heart, my troubled heart… I don’t want to simply stand still and look sad, at least not for too long. I want to bring this into the light, the light of your love, the light of the fellowship of those whom I trust, if only to say, please help. 

Jesus…help.

Jesus, hold.

Jesus, heal. 

How is Your Heart?

I want to end with one final question. How is your heart? 

It’s the question we’ve been asking all morning long… 

This heart — however you name it, however it feels — can we bless it, just as it is… 

James Baldwin makes a big claim in his book, The Fire Next Time:

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.” 

I want to invite us to hold these candles up together (or finger candles) — imagining our friends, our online church gathered together today… let us bless one another…  in this fellowship of beautiful, troubled, fleshy, burning hearts — that as our hearts would be larger, freer, more loving as we encounter Jesus along the way. As he presses his hand against our hearts. As his words and love cause our hearts to burn once again. May this be our blessing to one another today, as we blow out our candles, as the smoke extends the blessing of fire to one another. 

Let me pray for us. 

Jesus, our risen God who walks with us along the way, would our encounters with you leave our hearts burning — larger, freer, and more loving. 

I give thanks for this fellowship of sacred hearts here in this online church today — burning, hurting, full of the very same stuff as the galaxies. We love you Jesus and are grateful for all the ways you come close to us with your love. 

Friends, may the blessing of God, the God of our burning hearts, be with you as you go. 

Coming and Going

Good morning, my name is Willie Barnett and I’m a pastor at Great Road Church out in Acton, MA. Pastor Steve has become a dear friend over the past two years. And you may not know this, but this church, Reservoir, has been an inspiration and guide for us as our own community has been on a journey to becoming a more inclusive and welcoming community. So I’m really honored to be with you all this morning. Thank you for being YOU!

Today I’d like to read a snippet of scripture – a somewhat troubling text – from

Genesis chapter 16, starting with verse 6 (New International Version):

6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.

8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”

“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.

Now skipping down to verse 13:

13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” 

I just returned from a two-week trip to Kenya, which was really special because my Dad has served with the same missionary agency in East Africa almost my entire life, which is the same agency my grandparents served for their entire lives, and the same one my great-grandparents served for their entire lives. There’s been Barnetts serving with this one group in East Africa since 1907.

Which means LOYALTY is in my DNA. Commitment. Faithfulness. You stick to things.

And that’s not just a Barnett thing. It’s a Christian thing, right?

God’s love is a COVENANT love. Even when we’re unfaithful and disloyal, God sticks with us. God promises to never leave us nor forsake us. That’s what Jesus embodies.

So as followers of Jesus, we should love like Jesus – with a LOYAL love, KEEPING promises, STICKING TO our commitments. 

Churches love to celebrate LOYALTY and COMMITMENTS. I was recently at a wedding where two friends made promises to love one another, stick to one another – and everyone applauded, tears were streaming down our faces.

But do you know what churches rarely celebrate, or even talk about? LEAVING. Or, in Hagar’s words, “running away.” 

Leaving has always been hard for me to acknowledge or talk about. 

Yes, when we hit adulthood, we often leave home. Or sometimes God calls missionaries to leave the comforts of home. But for me, more often than not, leaving doesn’t feel loyal. 

Many years ago, my wife Becky and I co-pastored a church fresh out of seminary. And the mountain of relational, cultural, financial, and emotional problems we faced there was enormous and overwhelming! I’ll never forget the day a pastor-mentor friend of ours paid us a visit. For over an hour, he listened to us vent about all the insurmountable challenges. After all our venting, he paused and said,

“Why don’t you just leave?”

I was shocked by the suggestion. In the two intense years we had spent in the trenches working so hard to be faithful, I hadn’t once thought leaving was an option. I’m a Barnett – we need to stick with something for at least 100 years before we can consider leaving!

Because like Jesus, I’m loyal. And loyal people don’t leave. They stick with it.

Leaving is failure. Leaving is giving up. And faithful people don’t give up. 

Especially when it comes to churches and relationships. When it involves God-appointed places and God-blessed people. 

Anyone feel what I’m talking about?

Anyone know that voice in your heart and head?

‘Loyal people don’t leave. Leaving doesn’t honor a covenant-making, promise-keeping God. Leaving is failure.’ 

Some of you have been left. You know how painful it is when someone stops showing up, when someone gives up on you, when someone stops keeping their promise. You know that pain and you never want to inflict that pain on someone else. 

I know this is a sensitive subject but today I want to talk about and challenge the notion that just because you arrived somewhere – maybe a church, a relationship, a ministry, a vocation, a job – that feels like it has God’s stamp of approval on it does NOT mean you’re never allowed to leave that place, that relationship. 

Loyalty to God does NOT mean leaving is never an option.  

Now I can hear the voice of my parents saying,

‘Willie, we live in a rootless generation that’s cynical about promises, and you want to talk about leaving?’

Well, here’s my reasoning: because the church for so long has never talked about WHEN to leave, HOW to leave, IF God allows leaving – because we’ve lacked a theology of departure – so many people have stayed and suffered in harmful places to the point where they feel like the only choice left is to LEAVE God behind. 

It’s taken me awhile, but I’ve come to believe that sometimes God calls us to leave. Sometimes leaving is what loyalty to God looks like. 

People leave relationships, friendships, marriages, churches, jobs, schools, and commitments all the time for not-so-great reasons. I’m not trying to baptize or endorse every choice to leave by any means. I’m simply saying that SOMETIMES God calls us to leave. 

I’ve always loved the 23rd Psalm. It says the Lord

“guides me along right paths for his name’s sake.”

I noticed recently that it simply says “right paths” – not a single path, or the same path we’ve always been on. 

If you read the whole Psalm, you know those paths may lead THROUGH some dark valleys but, it’s clear they’re meant to lead us TO restoration, renewal, goodness and love.

So maybe God doesn’t always keep us in the same place, the same pasture, on the same path. God doesn’t always keep us in the same church, same relationships, same town, same job, same friendships, same vocation. Rather Jesus guides both our coming AND GOING, both our arriving and OUR LEAVING, all part of a journey to lead us deeper into an experience of the fullness of his life and love. 

But WHY and WHEN would God ever want us to leave a place, a relationship, a community, especially one God that has brought us to? 

That’s a BIG question, and there’s just one approach to that question I want to focus on today. 

Another one of my favorite Psalms is

Psalm 121. Verse 7 and 8

7 The Lord will keep you from all harm—
    [the Lord] will watch over your life;

8 the Lord will watch over your coming and going
    both now and forevermore.

This affirmation – that the Lord “watches over” and guides BOTH your coming AND GOING – comes in the context of God’s promise to “keep you from ALL HARM.”

You see, God may bring us to an appointed place, time, or relationship. God’s blessing might be on that. BUT sometimes that place, that relationship, can transform into a place of HARM. And then we need to go.

We see this in the scripture I read earlier. We already know that Abraham and Sarah are God’s chosen people. This is a family, a couple, that God has chosen, blessed, and called to be a blessing to others. 

And this isn’t just about Abraham and Sarah – they bring their entire extended household, their relatives and servants all travel with them on this journey of faith. 

But sometimes God’s people who are blessed to be a blessing become the opposite. 

Worried that God’s blessing won’t work out, Abraham and Sarah let fear control their actions. Instead of trusting that God would provide a child, they try to control things and take matters into their own hands. Sarah forces Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian, to become another wife to Abraham and to sleep with him. There’s no mention of consent or choice. When Hagar gets pregnant and realizes Sarah is just using her, she naturally starts to grow resentment towards Sarah. 

Rather than care for Hagar by protecting her and blessing her and her future child as a member of his household, as one he is obligated to care for, Abraham views Hagar as a disposable nuisance making his first wife unhappy. 

He absolves himself of responsibility for Hagar. And so Sarah begins to mistreat her. Another word for this is abuse.

Do you see what’s happened?

The family whom God blessed to be a blessing to all nations is abusing, mistreating, harming a member of their own household.

It’s maybe the first, but is certainly not the last time that pattern happens among God’s people. 

Perhaps some of you know what that feels like. People you trusted to bless you and protect you harmed and hurt you instead. If that’s you, maybe just take a moment to breathe. 

And so what does Hagar do?

Even though as an enslaved person and a woman she has no viable way to live on her own in that culture, no other household to flee to, nowhere else to go, she LEAVES.

She goes. She flees. She runs in the opposite direction.  

She chooses her INTEGRITY as a person over her IDENTITY as a “loyal” servant. She runs in the direction of DIGNITY.

Imagine for a moment what a difficult decision that was to make. Leaving her employer and provider. Leaving the people she depends on. Leaving the people whom God had chosen. The only people in the story so far that God has shown up for IS Abraham and Sarah – and Hagar is leaving them. It probably felt like she was leaving God.  

YET she hits the road. She flees TO the desert, the wilderness where she has nothing and no one but at least she is free FROM harm. 

And what happens?

“The angel of the Lord FOUND Hagar near a spring in the desert.”

God asks,

“Hagar… where have you come from, and where are you going?”

The God who promises to keep us from all harm, who watches over your life, watches over your coming and going SEES HER, FINDS HER, and MEETS HER in the wilderness!

If and when YOU flee harm being done by God’s people, if and when YOU choose integrity over a specific identity and role, you are not leaving God behind, because GOD goes with you. 

God watches over YOUR life, over both your coming AND GOING. 

And God meets us in the wilderness. 

There’s a member of our church community in Acton named Joyce. Many years ago she found herself in a similar situation. She’s given me permission to share this part of her story. Her Christian husband – who had promised love to her and she had promised to love faithfully – was mistreating her.

But it wasn’t something her church back then knew how to talk about. They knew how to call you to loyalty, but the idea of leaving was shrouded in shame. But her integrity and safety as a person was more important than her identity as a ‘good Christian wife’, a ‘good church member.’ Joyce had to flee from harm – which first meant getting a restraining order from her husband. And then separating from him, which all felt like running into a wilderness.

God’s people didn’t “see” her, didn’t know how to support her. Her husband wasn’t providing for her or caring for her. She was on her own spiritually, emotionally, financially – needing to find a way to provide for herself and her two young girls. She was in the wilderness.

And there, in that place, without looking for it, her path crossed with another woman from the same church community who also had a restraining order from her husband. And then she met another woman in those circumstances. And another. And another!

Five women, all from the same church, all fleeing into this wilderness space, through God’s divine appointment miraculously found one another. And they each realized,

‘I’m not alone. I don’t need to travel this journey alone.’

And they committed to walking their journey together. To becoming a safe space where they could each be heard, respected, protected, cared for, encouraged, and empowered to make loving and good life-choices. 

They called themselves HAGAR’S SISTERS because, like Hagar, when they fled from harm into the wilderness, God saw them, God found them, and God provided a community that gave them hope and healing.

And those relationships birthed a ministry. And for more than 15 years, the ministry of Hagar’s Sisters has been meeting woman after woman, hundreds upon hundreds of people, in the wilderness as they flee from harm, embodying the message that

‘there’s a God who sees you. You’re not alone. There’s a path to hope and healing.’  

God meets us in the wilderness.

But Hagar’s story can also be difficult to understand. God meets her, but then – in her situation – God tells her to go back to Sarah. Part of the reason for that is because, in that world, there were no shelters. There weren’t any other economic options for a woman. Hagar couldn’t get a job and become a woman of independent means. In that ancient world, women were completely dependent upon the provision of male head of household. 

And that’s where we need to notice that God doesn’t send her back to the SAME situation. Instead, God says, ‘you will give birth to a son. And that son will have descendants too numerous to count!’ In other words, just like Abraham and Sarah will be blessed with a great household, YOU TOO – Hagar – will be blessed with your OWN household! Imagine that? An enslaved woman living in a foreign nation will become the MOTHER of her OWN great household!

In THAT context, that would be amazingly good news. 

It also means that Hagar would not have to live dependent upon Abraham forever, but could eventually live freely as a part of her son Ishmael’s household. 

But a few chapters later, before that reality can mature, Abraham and Sarah now send Hagar and her young son away out in the wilderness, on their own. Ishmael is still in diapers.

The text literally says she wanders in the desert. Baby Ishmael is sobbing, Hagar is sobbing… but AGAIN God meets them there. We read this in

Genesis 21:

17 God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. 

18 Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”

19 Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

20 God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer.

21 While he was living in the Desert…, his mother (found) a wife for him from Egypt.

When we flee from harm into the wilderness, OR when we’re exiled and sent into deserted places against our will, God not only sees us there, God can provide refreshment and a future! 

When we’re in a harmful place, it can feel so scary to leave… because we can feel like we’re leaving God, or feel like we’re failing, or we can be told we’re irrational and ungrateful. Or some of you have been left, it wasn’t your choice… and here you are in the wilderness, a place you didn’t want to be. It can feel scary because we might not know what comes next. But the story of Hagar is that God meets us there and can give us a new pasture to thrive, new relationships, a future that might be fuller and more life-giving than anything we had experienced before! 

Did you know the first person in all of Scripture to name God is Hagar?

A young woman LEAVING God’s chosen people because she’s experiencing abuse IS the first person to give the almighty God a name! 

What should that tell us about how we do theology?

Genesis 16:13

“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.’”

And you know, she SAW God in the wilderness… precisely when she had the COURAGE to leave, to flee from harm. 

I was surprised when our friend Peter first suggested we could choose to leave our church. And we weren’t being mistreated or abused in that context. But what Peter was helping us see is that you and I always have CHOICES. We have agency. So with him and the encouragement of others, we did set boundaries. We said,

‘if the church chooses path A or path B, we can stay in this relationship. We can continue to be here. But if you choose path C, well, that’s opposite to why we came here to serve, to what we originally agreed to, and that violates our sense of integrity. And so we will choose integrity and leave if that happens.’ 

And that’s what happened. They chose path C, and we left. 

And I was angry. I was disappointed. I was hurt. I felt like I had failed. I felt like I let God down. I felt like maybe something was wrong with me. I was in the spiritual wilderness. I had lost my identity as ‘pastor.’ I had trust issues. I didn’t know if I could serve in a church again, because I might get hurt and let down again. 

But God saw me there… and provided.

Unexpectedly, the opportunity opened for me to serve at a Taiwanese-American church, something I never imagined for my life. 

And there I experienced more life and joy in ministry than I had before… and I eventually left that place because there was a new opportunity with a different kind of joy and life for me.

The slow lesson I’m learning is that loyalty to God sometimes means leaving one place – maybe because that place has become harmful, or maybe because integrity demands it, or maybe because God has a surprise for you – leaving one place so God can take you to a new place where there’s even GREATER joy and life. 

Or in the words of Taylor Swift, from her song ‘it’s time to go’ –

Sometimes giving up is the strong thing

Sometimes to run is the brave thing

Sometimes walking out is the one thing

That will find you the right thing

Now, the point of this message is not that if you’re BORED in your marriage, or FRUSTRATED in a friendship, or ANNOYED by long sermons at your church, you should just PEACE OUT. ALL relationships have challenges; ALL communities have certain tensions to bear and work through with love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness!

When a woman is experiencing intimate partner abuse and comes to Hagar’s Sisters, they actually don’t tell you whether to seek a divorce or not. 

They communicate that God’s desire is to keep you from harm. That God wants you to be in safe, loving relationships. That’s the space God is calling you to! And they invite women to choose integrity. And that might mean leaving. Sometimes, if the spouse catches the vision, that means seeking transformation within a relationship. Going to a NEW WAY of relating WITHIN an EXISTING relationship. 

The well-known marriage counselor Esther Perel once said,

“Most people are going to have two or three marriages or committed relationships in their adult life. Some of us will have them with the same person.“

What she’s getting at is that in ALL relationships, we need to keep GROWING. The invitation to LEAVE ONE kind of relationship and MOVE to a more life-giving kind of relationship isn’t just a question for those facing abuse – it’s a question for ALL healthy relationships. 

Becky and I have had several versions of our “marriage” within our 22-year-old marriage as we’ve LEFT certain patterns of relating, and gone at times into wilderness places, difficult places, tensive places, where we had to depend more on God and discover NEW patterns of relating. 

A healthy marriage, a healthy family system, a healthy church community, a healthy workplace isn’t static. It leaves old and hurtful patterns and looks for God to teach and provide new ways of being and relating. 

So my invitation for you today, for this summer, is to ask,

Is there something in your life that God is inviting you to leave? 

Maybe you’re experiencing abuse, or high levels of power and control in a relationship. If that’s the case, please reach out to Hagar’s Sisters or one of your pastors. God desires to keep you from harm, for you to be whole. Maybe you do need to leave a place of harm and seek a place of safety.

Or maybe you’re simply in a static place, or you feel tension in a certain situation, community, or relationship and you’re just stuck there. Instead of life to the full, it’s life-draining. What pattern or way of relating might you need to leave behind and what new pattern might you need to embrace?

Or maybe some new opportunities are arising in your life that God is inviting you to say ‘yes’ to. What might you need to first let go of, say ‘no’ to and lay down, in order to say ‘yes’ to this new thing?

Or maybe you’re in the wilderness today. And you feel alone. No one seems to get it. I just want you to know: God sees you and God can provide for you.

Let us pray.

The Kingdom of God Within

Luke 17:20-21

20 Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation;

21 nor will they say, [f]‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is [g]within you.”

Let me pray for us. 

Loving God, give us the grace to be in tune with you now. No matter where our hearts may be, no matter what’s on our minds, whether broken or scattered, or stubborn or indifferent, soften us through the power of your loving grace and mercy. We seek to create an empty space, a humbling space to hear truth, maybe through or maybe despite my words, that in the hearts and minds of each of us, you speak to us more loudly and clearly than anything I can arouse. Infuse in us the Holy Spirit, our teacher, our guide, who leads us and comforts us no matter the perils. Be with us now we pray and reveal to us your kingdom. Amen. 

I recently watched a film called My Octopus Teacher on Netflix. It was on the critically acclaimed list, so it must be good, and lately I am drawn to the sea, the ocean, the nature of all things that makes me feel small. It’s a documentary about a man, amidst a place of crisis and feeling stuck in life, decides to go back to one of his fondest childhood activities, diving underwater. There he encounters an octopus and from then on decides to go back to that same diving spot day after day, every day. He ends up going for more than 300 days, and the film captures that journey. Oh it’s beautifully shot. Just the wondrous and enchanting place that is underwater. And an octopus is a fascinating creature. Did you know that with its eight legs, sometimes on the ocean floor, it lands two of its legs down and walks, looking like a lady in an extravagant ball gown strutting about? 

I’ve been on a social media break lately and this journey of the filmmaker Craig Foster, intrigued me. The desire to just go underwater. Away from all the problems of the world, away from the busyness, the stress, and the pressures of life. Just dive down deep, and be completely engulfed in silence. 

I think spirituality can have that draw sometimes. In that deep spiritual presence of God in the inner places of my thoughts. That’s one of the reasons that this text today has always had a special place in my heart and in my theology. Kingdom of God within. The Kingdom of God within me! Oh how I longed to know and experience that. I have been so comforted by the knowledge that the name of God in Hebrew are breath vowels, YWHW, too holy to speak, that the Jewish people used a whole another name, Adonai when speaking of God. This breath that hovered over the waters in creation. The Holy Spirit as breath and wind has always spoken to me 

But can I be real with you? I landed on this text with the desire to share this particular idea, that God is inside you. That you can access God right here in your breath, as you look deeply close to your inner being. I wanted to say,

“See! Even Jesus said, God is within you!”

However the spirit of God had other plans and brought me to another place that I need to share with you. It was humbling, as I read and researched the text, that it wasn’t taking me where I was planning to go with it, but also more wondrous and expansive than my own spiritual longings. 

Just like my own spiritual longings, I think the church has also had this obsession with finding and pinpointing to that thing. That thing, that love, that peace, that kingdom of God, that reign of God when all is well and everything is good. While I was trying to find it here, it’s in here!

(When the text clearly says, 

“no one can say, “look the kingdom of God, see right here, it’s here!”), 

the church has often pointed to a literal heaven, specifically the afterlife. This apocalyptic language that has been central to American Christianity didn’t come out of thin air, but yes, it was very rooted in the biblical apocalyptic language that existed to describe and talk about God, or the reign of God. Some called it Kingdom of Heaven, some called it Kingdom of God, interchangeably, and yes it was trying to get at that thing, I believe, that we’re all seeking for. The Jewish tradition sometimes calls it Shalom. That state of peace, but not just nice peace, but justice, harmony, interconnectedness. And so actually the rest of today’s text, Jesus does go on using this similar apocalyptic language, talking about Noah’s flood, and Sodom’s rain of fire.

Jesus says in verse 34-37,

“34 I tell you, in that night there will be two [j]men in one bed: the one will be taken and the other will be left.

35 Two women will be grinding together: the one will be taken and the other left.

36 [k]Two men will be in the field: the one will be taken and the other left.”

37 And they answered and said to Him, “Where, Lord?” So He said to them, “Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together.””

Apocalyptic language was a genre. But, well,  it was based on reality. Reality that under Roman’s rule, complete destruction from the enemy was absolutely a possibility for them. That was their impending doom.. 

The notable new testament scholar N.T. Wright says this,

“The passage does not refer to an event in which natural or supernatural forces will devastate a town, a region, or the known world; rather like so many of Jesus’ warnings in Luke, it refers to the time when enemy armies will invade and wreak sudden destruction. The word that means ‘vultures’ is the same word as ‘eagles’ (ancient writers thought vultures were a kind of eagle), and there may be a cryptic reference here to the Roman legions, with the eagles as their imperial badge.”

It wasn’t about the “end times” but it was about a real current threat, speaking to the lived fears of the day. Something that they were worried about, a political, military issue of their time. And Jesus was speaking right to it, about it. 

A slice of Christian theology has come to pinpoint the kingdom of God as entering heaven or hell in the afterlife, understandably based on such apocalyptic literature. Many of you, probably most of you are too familiar with this, even if you are new to faith or didn’t grow up in the church. But if you did, maybe even more so, you’ve heard about the importance of being baptized or converting to Christianity so that you may go to heaven after you die.

Somewhere along the line, a helpful metaphor to describe the current issue of the day, became a literal place that drove people into shame or fear to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. I do think the metaphor CAN be helpful, in revealing the truth, but sometimes I feel like… I preach about once a month and every time I preach, I just want to say, “it’s a metaphor!” And metaphors are powerful but it can be unhelpful and sometimes even toxic and dangerous when taken literally. 

I was talking to a friend who’s left the church for a while. They said,

“why should I care? Who really knows what happens after you die? What matters to me is my life right now? Why is my life the state that it’s in right now and what does God think about that? Why isn’t he doing anything about it? He just wants to be worshiped?”

My heart was sad to hear about their life situation, and worse that they thought God didn’t care. I couldn’t just say,

“But God does care!”

because then what about their life, their current real struggles. I didn’t have an answer to that. So I just sat there, wondering too,

“how do we know that God cares about us, right now, our lives?” 

Do you ever wonder that? If God cares about you? If God cares about your specific situation? 

Thomas Merton in his book Contemplation in a World of Action, addresses the concerns of spiritual contemplation versus participation in the world. He critiqued the Catholic church for

“giving up on the world and retreating into the abstract” (Odell)

He says,

““Is it enough to wall the monk off in a little contemplative enclave and there allow him to ignore the problems and crises of the world, should he forget the way other men have struggle for a living and simply let his existence be justified by the fact that punctually recites the hours in choir, attend conventual Mass, strives for interior perfection and makes an honest effort to “live a life of prayer”?””

Merton’s legacy lies in a turning point for him, a turning from traditional monk endeavors, from asceticism to a holy active participation and integration in the world. Apparently this happened in Kentucky, there lays a plaque that marks this,

““In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”” 

 

This thinking goes against some Christian teachings I’ve heard. We’re only visitors here. This is not our home. Our real home is heaven, where God has prepared a palace for us. In fact, if we’re last here, we’ll be first there. It has pitted people against themselves, only caring about the spiritual realm rather than the place where “God themself became incarnate”. I think that’s compelling. If it was all spiritual, why did Jesus ACTUALLY come to earth, at a specific time and place. Couldn’t things just be fixed or compelled through some kind of magical powers. Why did Jesus care about the social structure of the day and spoke out against it? Why did Jesus embody a body at all? Why did Jesus literally heal people instead of telling them their pain will be no more in heaven when they die? I believe that a God that decided to not just wave their hands high up in the sky but decides to come, join, live in this world is a God that deeply deeply cares for this material world. This physical world. One who cares about the “sorrows and stupidities of the human condition”. 

The warning, “Behold, the kingdom of God is coming” isn’t, wasn’t what we think it means. You see things get lost in translation. Some languages have a much more nuance to things sometimes, that can be captured through a wide varied way of conjugating a verb. I experience this as an English as a Second Language speaker, I know, you probably think, wow her English is really good, and yes I worked hard to learn English because English is really hard. Learning a new language is really difficult because it’s not just speech, it’s ideas, it’s movement, it’s concept you are trying to understand.

For example in Korean, there are many ways to saying, “She’s coming over. You could say, “she’s on her way.” or “She’s about to come” or “She was about to come” which, you know the difference between the two sentences when the only difference is two letters. Or “She was coming” and then it connotes that maybe something else happened. 

When this text was translated,

“the Kingdom of God is within you.”

Turns out there are many different ways to translate this. Listen to variations. 

One could say, “Within you, within your hearts.” Or “Among you, in your midst.” Which is a HUGE difference because one is personal and individual, whereas the latter is PLURAL and COMMUNAL. And even not pinpoint-able but in the movement within you. Like the Kingdom of God is not here(person) or here (person) but here (the in-between them two). 

I have an old critical commentary of the Bible that my dad bought from a book dealer in Korea when he was in seminary. Its first print dates 1901. And it says that it wouldn’t have made sense for Jesus to say that it’s in your heart, because he was talking to the Pharisees, which he was always making the point that they were not getting the point.

Cyril of Alexandria, a writer from the 4th century, makes it mean,

“lies in your power to appropriate it.” 

The kingdom of God lies in your power to appropriate it. REALLY? N.T. Wright puts it similarly,

“The phrase (in your midst) is more active. It doesn’t just tell you where the kingdom is; it tells you that you’ve got to do something about it. It is ‘within your grasp’; it is confronting you with a decision…”

My seminary professor said, “the Kingdom of God is coming” is more like,

“The kingdom of God is right in front of your nose.”

And my translation would be,

“The kingdom of God is about to be all up in your face. What are you gonna do about it?” 

The kingdom of heaven is not up there, or after we die. The kingdom of heaven is right here and the question isn’t where it is but what are you going to do about it? 

The end of the film, My Octopus Teacher says this, and I’m not spoiling it for you, because it’s impossible for me to spoil the visual magnificence of the film by quoting it, but he closes by saying,

“What she taught me was to feel… that you’re part of this place, not a visitor. That’s a huge difference.”

This has implications not only to the social political problems of the day, but also for us these days to our environment, which I don’t have time to get into now. But the spirit of God, the reign of God includes you, your body, our earth, your problems, the octopus, the war, and everything in-between, all in our midst. How could that be? I don’t know. But that seems to be the invitation here, The kingdom of God lies in your power to appropriate it. Is that too close for comfort? Is that too much power in our hands instead of God or Jesus? That’s what Jesus seems to be saying…

I’ll leave you with another quote from Jesus, from John 14:12. He says,

“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”

THEY WILL DO EVEN GREATER THINGS THAN THESE. You will do even greater things than Jesus! Do you believe that? I don’t know. Let’s pray about it. I don’t know, that’s the end of my talk. Let’s pray. 

God how can it be. What are humans that you are mindful of them? Human beings that you care for them? You have given us your spirit to be with us, and have charged us with your call. Help us to see and listen, and participate in the great wave of your power blowing over the waters of chaos. Oh Spirit, compel us to realize that we are co-creators, conduits of your kingdom here and now, on earth as we imagine it in “heaven”, may it be, let us be that. WE pray in the strong name of Jesus Christ Amen. 

Love Is…a Confession

Genesis 3:7-21

7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as God was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock

    and all wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly

    and you will eat dust

    all the days of your life.

15 And I will put enmity

    between you and the woman,

    and between your offspring[a] and hers;

he will crush[b] your head,

    and you will strike his heel.”

16 To the woman God said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;

    with painful labor you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband,

    and he will rule over you.”

17 To Adam God said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

    through painful toil you will eat food from it

    all the days of your life.

18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

    and you will eat the plants of the field.

19 By the sweat of your brow

    you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

    since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

    and to dust you will return.”

20 Adam[c] named his wife Eve,[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.

21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

 

I sometimes really don’t like the subtitles they put on top of the different sections of the Bible chapters. This one I read just now, some have it titled, “The Fall” or “The First Sin and Its Punishment,” The editors of the Bible are presenting their understanding and theology, or the moral of the story to the reader. Its insistence and presumed authority doesn’t sit well with me, but then again I feel like that with most power and authority exercised this way. 

It’s like when my girl is playing. The other night she put on a variety of things on herself as a costume, a karate belt over one shoulder, my scarf on the other, a cape, one of my husband’s slippers on her leg and the other on her wrist. She twirled and said it was a show. And we sat and clapped saying, what a wonderful show! And I said, Jaga (that’s what I call her) is princess, because that’s what she’s been into, and she said, no! This is a “Jaga wears a weird costume show.” I said okay, Jaga wears a weird costume show wow! She handed me a piece of paper, and I said, oh is this the show notes? And she said, No! It’s a bonus card. Oh okay, thank you for the bonus card.

She hates it when you don’t listen to her directions when we’re playing. And when you listen, you find out what’s important to her. I pay attention to what and how she names, the animal, the activity, to find out how she understands the world. And honestly, it’s usually much more rich, beautiful, and fascinating than my cliches and norms. 

Our Kids Church curriculum uses a method called Godly Play, which names stories from the Bible that’s not only easier to understand for children but also in ways that are theologically appropriate. Godly Play names this Genesis 3 story as not the Fall, but “The Falling Apart: The falling apart and coming back together in a new way.” Now isn’t that a better title than “The First Sin and its Punishment?” I think so!

As a pastor, one of my jobs is translating things into today’s context, for our day to day lives. And the language sin and punishment was one way to explain and capture this relationship we have with God, that may have worked, and even worked well at one time, but I would say for me, today, it needs reworking. The title “The Fall,” this concept of things being right, and then when wronged, you fall from the graces, is trying to explain what’s happening. But what if, what if it wasn’t so hierarchical, where God is here, and you are supposed to be here, and when you sin you fall. What if, like the Godly Play title, it’s less about hierarchy and what’s right and wrong, but about relationship, the element of estrangement and turning away, the falling apart of love, and that it can be put back together in a new way. 

Today I want to talk about this, how to come back together in a new way. We’re in the series of talking about Love is…, and I titled it Love is a Confession. And I’m purposely using the “old” language, confession to try for us to go deeper into the word, get through some of the ways it has been used to coerce or control, and redefine it to find the truth of what it was trying to get at–it was never about just coming clean, but coming back. You don’t have to be clean, you just have to come back in a new way.

Understanding God through sin and confession has often been this way: you sin, you confess, and then you’re forgiven and right with God. There’s something about the act of confession that is true, but over the years, it became a ritual, and then a rule, and then just a thing you had to do. 

I think about the catholic tradition. I don’t know much except from movies and things, where you go into a little box and the priest listens from the other side and absolves you of your sin. And the concept of penance, which feels definitely archaic and foreign, even strange, that you should do something because of your guilt or shame. And at the same time, the process of moving from something wrong to something right, does seem like there needs to be some way to make it up. 

During the Reformation, the 16th century when some folks were trying to reform the catholic church, some of these traditions shifted to align with the ever progressing theology of the times. The sacrament of penance was done away with but there still needed to be some way that people could practice getting honest and real with God. So they came up with the corporate confession of sin, changing the “I confess” to “we confess.” And the underlying theology behind it was, not that you must confess in order to receive forgiveness but it became part of the liturgy, the work of the people, a kind of storytelling through declaration in worship. And this is where we got it right. [picture] Jesus is so lucky to have us.

You don’t come to receive worship, you exercise worship. You are doing the work. You are proclaiming and telling the story together. So an act in worship, like a prayer of confession, is less an act of transaction but a declaration, to say we confess boldly and safely because God’s grace and mercy is enough and abundant. By confessing our sins, we confess that God is safe, loving, and compassionate. 

Because if it is not safe, you should not confess. 

A while ago a person emailed me and the other pastors a confession. I’ve gotten their permission to share. Here’s what it said:

I am asking that you continue to keep me in your prayers as I try and gain control over my need to smoke marijuana as well as binge eating. I’ve turned to these unhealthy behaviors as a way to cope with my fears and anxiety.  

Although I know that God is with me during the good and bad times… I also found comfort with these unhealthy behaviors. It’s been my dirty little secret that I felt too embarrassed to talk about or ask for prayer. In order for me to continue this path of emotional and physical healing, it’s time to address these issues. 

God has been nudging my soul and telling me that it’s time to break away from these behaviors and it’s okay to talk about it to others. During this season of Advent I’ve been praying for full liberation from the things that are holding me back from finding my inner peace. This past Tuesday, I made a promise to myself that I was no longer going to smoke marijuana or binge eat. I’ve had an eating disorder since I was a little girl. In the past I have seeked help for this but when we went on lockdown last year, my eating disorder came back. 

Today was my second day of not smoking… I was really naive in thinking because I am a light smoker that my body would not crave it if I stopped… Well I was wrong. Today was really rough but I refuse to continue to allow this to have control over me. I am and will overcome this need to turn to marijuana. Not smoking has also helped with wanting to binge eat. I know that I can do this… It’s not going to be easy but it must be done! I can honestly say being back at Reservoir Church has definitely helped in SO many ways. So thank you for all your prayers as I continue this path of finding inner peace and a closer connection with God.

It was a big thing for this person to share. When you feel like you have a secret, it feels like that. And really, we humans, all the ways we lie, cheat, steal, gloat in pride, manipulate and so on. And all that we do to cover it because we feel bad about it only makes it worse sometimes. In fact, I would go as far as to say, often it’s not even the act itself that eats us, but the secrecy and the shame from the act.

That’s why I wanted to share Genesis 3 with you today, despite the gender problematic  language in the second creation story, as opposed to the first one, which pastor Ivy read from last week, “let us make humankind in our image.” You see, the Bible is okay with diversity, even two opposing accounts of the creation. And that is what we have. Please if you’ve never heard about this, it makes a world of difference to our faith to know this one fact.

We have two creation stories. And the Jewish texts were okay laying them right next to one another. Genesis 1 is the first creation account. And 2-3 is the second creation account. We know this because the stories are two completely different styles. In fact they have two different names for God. The first one called God Elohim, and the second calls it Yahweh, which is why the biblical scholars distinguish the two to be one from the Elohist tradition and Yahwist tradition: They come from two different traditions! 

And it just so happens that the Elohist captures the creation of human beings born out of a community, let us make humankind in our image, God created them, male and female. Whereas in the Yahwist tradition, man is created first and then the whole story about the rib and Eve, AND it includes this sin and fall story. 

Honestly I think the second creation story honestly is just someone, a man, trying to explain the reason behind patriarchy with things like, God talked to the man first, and how all this came about because he listened to his wife, which he shouldn’t have, which is why after the fall her desire will be for her husband, and he will rule over her. Yes, I agree with Yahwists that this is a result of a broken world and that there is a way toward renewed relationship that is sewn back in a new way. There’s more I can and want to say but I’m running out of time. 

I picked text because I have a different point than we should confess. This text doesn’t even have an apology or a confession. Look at the man and the woman, they both shift blame and make excuses. Can you relate? 

But look at what God is doing. Always look at that, in any Bible story, what is God doing? The first thing God does here is ask,

“Where are you?” 

God says,

“Where are you?” 

God is looking for you. And the things that follow, they can be seen as punishment,  but it has also served as stories that explain how things came to be like why snakes don’t have legs. But after that part, how does the story end? God elevates the man-made fig leaves to garments of skin and clothed them.

God looks for you and covers you. 

Where are you?

What have you done? 

There might be some consequences but more importantly, come here, put this on. Let me cover you. Let me protect you. 

This is the work of confession. Confession is a response to God’s love, not a prerequisite. It’s a proclamation of a God that loves you, cares for you, looks for you, wants to bring you back to make things new, and sews us back together with Godself. This is our confession, not what we have done wrong but who God is regardless. Our Confession is actually, not sin, but Love. 

Let me pray for us. 

God of Love who calls us back again and again. Call us back even now, even if we were to say the things that we’re most ashamed of right now, you lift up our chins with your loving hand and say, welcome home. Lead us back to you, no matter where we’ve been, that is what we confess God… Here I am. Deliver us, back to you we pray. Amen. 

Re-Membered: Thoughts on the Meaning of Communion and Salvation

For this week’s Events and Happenings, click “Download PDF.”

A few weeks back, I mentioned the thing I remember most from when I started going to Sunday church services on the regular. It was the time once a month when we would take communion together, eating these tiny bits of stale-tasting crackers and drinking these mini-cups of juice that were supposed to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ crucified.

We were told to confess our sins before communion. And what I loved was that after the whole thing, the pastor would say to us that if we confessed our sins, God was faithful and just to forgive all unrighteousness so that before a holy God, we stood totally free and in the clear.

I didn’t understand what all that meant, but I loved the words free and in the clear. Like a lot of teenagers, I didn’t feel free very often, but I did in this moment. I felt accepted, good enough, satisfied. I also had this highly attuned sense of guilt and shame (probably for some good reasons and a few bad reasons) but I loved this moment of being told to let it all go – that I was in the clear.

Looking back, though, what’s odd are all the things that were never said. I mean, as a 15-year-old, I had bigger problems than my moral guilt. Parts of me were doing fine, but parts of me were lonely and scared a lot of the time. And I carried pain and even trauma in my life that I had no idea how to talk about or what to do with.

Yet here at communion, at what represented to us Jesus’ table, what to do with our hurt wasn’t talked about at all. We were told how this table spoke to our sin, but to our hurt and loneliness – not at all.

That was the situation for me, whose life was pretty stable and privileged in a lot of ways. But what if I was taking communion in a church full of refugees, fleeing persecution or genocide? What if we were in a community trying to rebuild after a devastating war? What if the majority of my faith community suffered under dehumanizing racism or poverty or other indignities? How would this communion table of Jesus’ sin-forgiveness speak to us? Would this message of freedom from guilt be sufficient for our salvation?

I love communion. Some of what feel like my holiest moments in my time at Reservoir have been serving communion to children excited to be part of it, or to adults in tears, feeling the power of God’s inclusion and embrace.

I love that we worship with communion every week in our in-person services. I ache that for those of us worshipping and gathering online, we’ve done this so little the past year and a half. (And at least today we’ll change that, as we remember together with whatever bit of food and drink you have available. Feel free to grab something now real quick – it doesn’t have to be bread and wine or juice – any scrap of food, any bit of drink will do in a pinch.) 

But I’m aware that the whole thing can be kind of confusing. What’s happening in this moment of worship? What are we remembering and doing?

This has been a topic of discussion and even debate among followers of Jesus since people first started remembering Jesus together. So, I don’t pretend like I have the final word here. But as we get close to the end of our fall series on Jesus’ table, today I share my thoughts on what’s going on at Jesus’ communion table – way back at the first one we read about in the Bible, and especially at the table where churches remember Jesus today. I’ll share my belief on what’s mainly happening during communion, which in a lot of ways represents what I consider to be the primary aspects of the salvation God offers humanity in Christ as well.

The call, the purpose of a local church, is no less to be a place where liberation and healing begins. And the communion table is a place of liberation and healing for us all.

It has to do with this word “remember”, two different takes on that word.

Let’s start reading one of the four main passages in the Bible about Jesus’ table, the story of Jesus’ last supper with his students in the good news of Luke. It goes like this:

Luke 22:14-23 (Common English Bible)

14 When the time came, Jesus took his place at the table, and the apostles joined him.

15 He said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

16 I tell you, I won’t eat it until it is fulfilled in God’s kingdom.”

17 After taking a cup and giving thanks, he said, “Take this and share it among yourselves.

18 I tell you that from now on I won’t drink from the fruit of the vine until God’s kingdom has come.”

19 After taking the bread and giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

20 In the same way, he took the cup after the meal and said, “This cup is the new covenant by my blood, which is poured out for you.

21 “But look! My betrayer is with me; his hand is on this table.

22 The Human One goes just as it has been determined. But how terrible it is for that person who betrays him.”

23 They began to argue among themselves about which of them it could possibly be who would do this.

First, at the communion table, we remember the death of Jesus, with its weird mix of tragedy and beauty. And we remember Jesus telling us we are forgiven, so that we can turn to more free and more just lives.

From the beginning, Jesus said this table was the start of a practice. He says to his students, and those of us to come in the future:

Do this in remembrance of me.

Jesus wanted to be remembered.

We remember Jesus’ closest friends falling asleep when he most needs their support. We remember how Jesus’ students forgot or ignored his teaching on non-violent peace-making, and tried to fight, until Jesus stops them. We remember how Jesus’ friends mostly abandon him, in one case betray him, right after sharing a meal at the table with him.

We remember that the most admired human in history was tortured and executed by the state. We remember that the human so many of us believe reveals the person of God to us was misunderstood, rejected, and killed.

We remember Jesus, and we remember the tragic folly of humanity, how whenever we see God, we’re liable to try to eliminate what we see.

We remember the beauty of this all too.

We see Jesus’ kindness toward an enemy who’s out to get him. We see his love and courage and grace under pressure. And I think we see what the self-giving, sacrificial love of God looks like. It’s beautiful.

There’s a phrase in the Orthodox Christian faith that beauty will save the world. And maybe if we kept remembering Jesus, the beauty of his love in the face of death would push us all to stop scapegoating. To stop bullying, to stop arming ourselves, to shut down cycles of blame and shame and revenge and violence. Maybe the beauty of love in the face of hate will save us still.

Part of the beauty of this we remember is God’s forgiveness of us expressed by Jesus too. It’s not the central theme of this Last Supper. Of the four principal passages on Jesus’ communion table in the New Testament, forgiveness is actually only mentioned in one.

Where Mark and Luke have Jesus sharing a cup of wine he calls the cup of the new covenant, Matthew adds that this new covenant includes the forgiveness of sins. Paul’s big passage in I Corinthians on communion doesn’t mention forgiveness at all.

So, forgiveness of sins isn’t the only or even the main thing we remember about Jesus, but it’s important still. Jesus proclaimed God’s forgiveness of sin throughout his ministry, and as he died on the cross, he also prayed:

Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing.

And like most Christians, I read the “them” there as Jesus’ killers but as all of us too. God forgives us our sin – all the foolish and death-dealing and tragic ways we lose our way and hurt ourselves and one another and this whole world of ours. God recognizes that at least in part, we have no idea what we are doing. And God doesn’t want to hold it all against us. God doesn’t want payback or punishment. Have you ever noticed how many people who are blamed and shamed just get defensive and angry, or shrivel up in despair?

God doesn’t want that for God’s kids. God wants liberation and healing. God wants us to know the freedom of acceptance and a clear conscience, so we can live freely and make amends for the harm we’ve done – make it better – without fear of curse or rejection.

This forgiveness is an important part of the new deal with God Jesus inaugurates. That with God, we are never defined by our biggest mistake. We are not treated as the sum of our worst acts and biggest lacks. Before a holy and just and God, we are indeed loved and we are free.

So, I think it’s good to confess our sins to God when we take communion and even to do so daily in prayer. To say

God, this is what I’m sorry for.

People and communities that don’t confess sin are more likely to become smug, proud, violent, and entitled. They’re more likely to notice what’s wrong with everyone else, not themselves, and become embattled and embittered. In many ways, this is the drift of our world, certainly the drift of our culture. Confession of sin keeps us humble. And confession, and remembering we are forgiven, is a chance to find freedom and acceptance and to take the energy this brings to do better and make things right in the world.

So, confession and forgiveness are important things that are happening at the communion table. But as I said at the top, they are not the only thing.

At the communion table, a second thing is happening.

At the communion table, we remember Jesus, and the Spirit of Jesus also re-members us: puts us back together, heals us, reconnects us. 

Here’s what I mean.

When I was a teen, I needed forgiveness, but more than that, I needed to know that I wasn’t alone. That certain things that had happened to me were not my fault. And that life could get better. That God, love, people, faith could possibly help.

When I take communion now, sometimes I confess my sin, but sometimes I tell God about who and what has disappointed me, or at the ache I feel from my worries and my hurt and from all that’s wrong with the world.

There’s a Korean theologian whose work I love, who I’ve had the privilege of speaking with – he’s named Andrew Sung Park. And he writes a lot about what he calls han.

Han is the great burden of most of humanity. Not so much the ways we sin and hurt others, but the many ways that we have been hurt.

Han is a Korean word that describes “the depths of human suffering,” “the abysmal experience of pain.” It is the condition of the sinned against, the victim, the abandoned, the oppressed, the harmed. Han can be expressed actively in hatred and aggression, as the will to revenge. Or it is expressed passively, through “self-denigration, low self-esteem, self-withdrawal, resignation, and self-hatred.” It can be unconscious or conscious.

Han is me as a teenager, the abuse victim who’s too distressed over his experience to tell anyone.

Han is the shame of the constantly criticized. It is the fear of the threatened. Han is the ache of those who grieve. It’s the loss of the abandoned.

Han can be collective too – the resentment and anger or the despair and lamentation of the targets of racism or violence.

Han can even characterize collective experiences, as active racial resentment or passive racial lamentation. Even nature itself experiences han. We consider severely befouled landscapes or the state of animals in factory farms.

To people suffering from han, if you say: it’s OK, you’re forgiven, what kind of message is that? That the suffering and hurt was their fault, but God turns aside. No, the suffering and hurt was the fault of someone else, or of some broken or corrupt system, or of chaos or chance.

But where we hurt, where we feel and experience han, we are not guilty, we are dis-membered. We are not at peace in our own lives and experience. And often our hurt pulls us away from loving connection as well so we are dis-membered from ourselves and dis-membered from community.

At Jesus’ communion table, God re-members us.

Jesus says my body is given for you. My blood is poured out for you.

I am with you. You have God’s feeling, God’s attention, God’s resources, God’s life with you.

At the communion table, our hurt is seen and felt by Jesus, the fellow sufferer who understands.

At the communion table, our hurt is validated by God, who has experienced violence and betrayal, who has been the victim of crime and injustice, who has had sneering eyes look at his poor, brown body and mocked and spat upon him. The God who knows these experiences in God’s body is in our corner with our hurt.

At the communion table, our lonely self is seen by Jesus who felt so alone in his death that he cried out loud:

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

Our forsakenness is met by a forsaken God, who remembers us and is listening.

At the communion table, our hurt no longer has the final word. We discover a union, a connection, a fellowship, a friendship with an everlasting God, with everlasting creative redemptive stories of bringing good out of bad, growing in us an everlasting hope that with the help of God and friends, that will be our story too.

And at the communion table, we take and eat and drink together. We’re encouraged to look around, to look at the eyes and the bodies of a community of imperfect, han-ridden, wounded, sinning, beautiful, messy fools who have messed up like us, who have been hurt like we have, and who are loved by a beautiful God and are on the same journey of recovery and discovery as we are.

We are re-membered to a community called the Body of Christ, where we are encouraged to love and accept one another. To welcome one another – our whole selves, just as we are – as Christ has welcomed us, so that we can find our welcome, and our next chapters, and our new and beautiful stories and purposes together.

Sin lessens us and hurts others. Our pride, our violence, our misdirected or uncontrolled desires hurt others, mar community, and diminish people and places. We need forgiveness and freedom to find a better path.

And our hurt rips us apart and diminishes our whole minds and bodies. It can cast a cloud of negativity and doom over our whole lives. We need the power and presence of a loving God who knows our stories, who understands, and who will re-member us to a more whole and hopeful self, and re-member us to loving community as well.

So, here’s what I’m encouraging you to do.

Stay active in a section of the Body of Christ. Take communion as often as it is offered.

And when you do so, bring your whole messy self, honestly to the table.

Confess your sins to the God who is faithful and just, and who is eager to forgive you of all your sins and cleanse us of all that isn’t right – to give us a clean conscience and a new start, and freedom to make amends and do right.

And when you come to the communion table, name your hurts and wounds and loneliness and need to Jesus, the fellow sufferer who understands, and who by the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God will put you back together, re-member you to one who is more whole and hopeful.

And look around you, at the grace of a community of fellow travelers, and be re-membered to one another. Offer best as you can the gift of your real self and your real story to your community. And offer the welcome and encouragement and love of the body of Christ as well, since that is who we are.

Thanks be to God.

Take a moment and sit with this invitation, as Pastor Lydia comes our way to welcome us to this table.

 

Every Day Pentecost: Listening to the Spirit Daily

For this week’s Events and Happenings, click “Download PDF.”

For this week’s Spiritual Practice, led by Lydia Shiu, click HERE.

Hey, it’s been a while. I’m Steve, if we haven’t met, or if you’ve just forgotten that I’m around. I’m one of our pastors here at Reservoir. Thank you so much for your support in letting me take some extra time off after eight years into a delightful run as a senior pastor here. I took a month to take it easy, enjoy time with my beloved family, and get some time to myself. It was really refreshing to catch a break. If you have a chance to take even a few days off for rest and reflection after the year we’ve all been through – hey, even a few hours here and there, I highly recommend that. If any of you ever need some ideas on how to take a break for personal renewal, or maybe how to do that in your mid-life years in particular, let me know. I’m always game to help with that kind of thing. 

All to say, though, it’s great to be speaking with you again. I’m looking forward to today, as well as to some preaching I’ll be doing this summer starting next week. I’ll write a little bit about that in this week’s newsletter, coming to your email on Wednesday. 

Also, Happy Pentecost Sunday today! In the Christian calendar, Pentecost is a commemoration of the time when Jesus’ first followers experienced a captivating, powerful sense of God’s presence with them not long after they lost God’s presence among them through the person of Jesus. Jesus had said

after I go, things will get better, not worse. I will be with you through an Advocate, a Comforter, a Strengthener, a Truth-Teller, an Encourager,

literally as one who comes alongside, in Greek the Paraclete, which is the unseen Spirit of God. And Pentecost remembers a significant time Jesus’ first followers knew this was so. 

Pentecost was a holiday already, though, 2000 years ago. In Hebrew, it’s called Shavuot. And Shavuot, in the Jewish tradition, is also the celebration of the presence and gifts of God through two other means. Shavuot remembers the gift of God’s law, the Torah, to Moses in ancient times. Thank God for words to live by, for guidance for a healthy, just, good life. And it remembers the gift of food – Shavuot was a spring harvest festival. Thank God for food to live by. 

So Happy Pentecost to you today. And happy Shavuot!

This year, on Shavuot/Pentecost, I have on my mind the beautiful story of the Bible’s book of Ruth. I love this little book. Back in 2015, we did a whole multi-week series in this book – it was a project Will Messenger worked on with me. You can still find it online deep in our sermon archives. Ruth is a short book – you can read it easily in a sitting – and it’s got tragedy, redemption, great characters, sex and romance, surprise twists, and all kinds of beautiful and wise things it can illuminate when read well. But today, on Pentecost, there are three reasons I want to center this story.

One, it’s like the original Pentecost book. It’s an old, old story set around the time of a spring harvest and still read today in many Jewish communities around this holiday.

Two, the original Pentecost is a celebration of the giving of Torah, the articulation of Law by which people would find health and order and justice and life. It is the celebration of the command to live in what was meant to be the original expression of Beloved Community in our faith traditions. But Ruth messes with what law means in really interesting ways. 

The little book of Ruth pushes creative tension into the Old Testament’s account of what to do with law. 

See, in the Torah, there’s this bit of boundary marking about who can or can’t be at worship in the temple. And after the requisite comments about crushed testicles and other issues (I kid you not!), we get this:

Deuteronomy 23:3-4a

3Ammonites and Moabites can’t belong to the Lord’s assembly. Not even the tenth generation of such people can belong to the Lord’s assembly, as a rule,

4 because they didn’t help you with food or water on your journey out of Egypt.

That is some serious shade cast on other ethnic groups. If it sounds like someone’s grinding an ax here, well it’s because they are. These two ancient nation-states didn’t help us out, so they are never welcome in our house. And we’ll be tracking lineage, 10 generations deep. That’s extreme. 

But this thing with the Moabites doesn’t go away. In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Israelite men who marry Moabite women are publicly shamed and commanded to divorce their wives. There are beatings, brawls over this thing. 

This strand of tension in the Bible reminds us that long standing conflicts with near neighbors do not heal easily or quickly. Time does not heal all wounds. The pain and bitterness and grudges and inequities and perpetuation of harm that flows from injustice can keep cursing down to the 10th generation and more. 

Think of Israel and Palestine, and what’s happening this spring.

Think race relations in this country, and race-based violence, as we remember the murder of George Floyd one year ago. 

One way out of the plague of memory and resentment is separation, exclusion, barriers. Torah prescribes this for the Moabites, delineating who’s right, who’s wrong, and how to achieve safety and justice. 

But then we get Ruth, which is a celebration of intermarriage between Jewish men and the most remarkable Moabite women, one of whom becomes the great-grandmother of the greatest ever king of Israel.

One lesson of Ruth for Shavuot is that legal and moral, ethical matters need to be worked out not just with principles in mind, not just abstractly, but in real, earthy detail, humanely, with specific people and places in mind.

This is true when it comes to border policies and policing. It’s true when it comes to things like family rules and company policies and practices as well. How do we do right by people? How do we heal wounds? How do we achieve justice? We need law and principles, but we can’t only follow them in the abstract. We have to love and honor the real people and situations in front of us that we’re dealing with today? What do dignity and love and justice and healing look like on the ground? 

And that could have been the sermon. Padraig O’Tuama has a whole book out about this. It’s called Borders and Belonging. You can check it out if you like. 

But there’s something else I feel we’re supposed to see today as we finish our series on Listening to the Spirit. Which is that Ruth is also a book about the creative leading of the Spirit of God in daily life. 

There are these three moments in Ruth where three different people say or do something utterly surprising, achingly beautiful, and powerfully transformative. Let’s read each and ask – why did this happen? And how did this happen? And what does this show us about how the Spirit of God speaks to and leads you and me? 

First, there’s Naomi. Naomi is a middle aged Jewish woman, widowed before her time. As a result, she finishes raising her two sons as a single mom. They grow up in Moab and marry Moabite women, this big no-no in the tradition, we heard. But after they marry, they each die young as well. And now Naomi has two Moabite daughters-in-law, trying to survive a famine together. In a patriarchal age, in which widows often faced destitution, you’d think Naomi would cling to her daughters-in-law, try to ride one of their coattails into a better situation. 

But instead she does this. 

Ruth 1:8-9 

8 Naomi said to her daughters-in-law, “Go, turn back, each of you to the household of your mother. May the Lord deal faithfully with you, just as you have done with the dead and with me.

9 May the Lord provide for you so that you may find security, each woman in the household of her husband.” Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept.

Naomi thinks everyone will be better off in their own homeland. Dissolve this mixed family, go back as a beggar among her people, and let her daughters-in-law start over. That’s one way of reading the scene.

But another is to see in Naomi this extraordinary, self-giving, sacrificial love. Longing to see her daughters-in-law flourish, she encourages them to move on without her. It’s like: if you love somebody, set them free. In a way, it’s this extraordinary moment of love and courage. Where did this freedom come from? 

One daughter in law, Orpah, says a tearful goodbye, but the other, Ruth says: no way, we’re family now. My life is bound to yours. Let’s do this together. We get this in the text.

Ruth 1:16-18 

16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to abandon you, to turn back from following after you. Wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

17 Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord do this to me and more so if even death separates me from you.”

18 When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped speaking to her about it.

Ruth is the woman who helps care for her in-laws, even though they’re not her parents. She’s the busy woman who makes time to visit her parents, and sing through the window while they’re in lockdown during COVID. She’s the loyal friend, the loyal spouse who hangs in through sickness, mental illness, turns of fortune. Ruth is this paragon of love, to the degree that her words get used sometimes in wedding vows. And as the book, she will become a paragon of courage and boldness in different ways as well. 

She, a Moabite, is the rare person in the scriptures who is called an Eshet Hayil, a woman of valor, like the highest compliment you can give a woman in this tradition.

How does she live this way? Where does this love and courage come from?

The last, the third main character we meet is a Jewish landowner, and distant cousin of Naomi’s. His name is Boaz. 

When Naomi and Ruth return to Israel. Naomi sends Ruth to glean in his fields – to pick the extra harvest that Jewish law prescribed landowners to leave behind for those who had nothing. It’s a practice of Beloved Community that was baked into the law, that people with access to capital recognize their privilege and good fortune, and make sure it benefits those without capital as well. It’s like the obligation of a business – not just to its profits and customers, but to the broader community, and to the land, and to the native peoples of the land in which it operates. 

Anyway, Boaz meets Ruth and doesn’t just encourage her to keep gleaning in his fields. He goes out of his way to ensure she is protected against any possible sexual harassment and is empowered to thrive. Here’s one bit from Boaz.

Ruth 2:8-9 

8 Boaz said to Ruth, “Haven’t you understood, my daughter? Don’t go glean in another field; don’t go anywhere else. Instead, stay here with my young women.

9 Keep your eyes on the field that they are harvesting and go along after them. I’ve ordered the young men not to assault you. Whenever you are thirsty, go to the jugs and drink from what the young men have filled.”

The language is lifted out of the ancient times of the story, but Boaz emerges as what Richard Beck calls a “man of valor”, a Gibor Hayil. And it’s cool that what makes a man of valor is not wealth or power or skill in war, or any other ancient patriarchal archetypes. What makes a man of valor in Ruth is doing the right thing with your privilege, is generous and fair labor practice, is just and kind and appropriate relationship with women. 

Boaz goes on to follow his culture’s laws of goodness toward one’s distant in-laws, and through a kind of hot nighttime rendezvous, ends up becoming Ruth’s husband as well. It’s a great story, but it starts with Boaz meeting Ruth when she is most vulnerable and determining to be safe and tender and just and kind.

Where does this all come from? How is this man led to be so good?

I think what’s playing out in this story for each of the three main characters are the same things that play out in our own way in all our lives. So let me highlight three things that I think can lead us toward listening to and flowing with the movement of the Spirit for us, today. 

First – We’re all playing improv, all our lives, all the time.

Ruth is set in hard times. In the Bible, it comes right after the book of Judges, which tells the story of a hot mess of just about every kind of suffering and violence known to our species. No one’s living their best life, getting their dream job, married to their soulmate, or in any other way, living the dream.

The book of Ruth is all about people doing their best with their back-up plans, and sometimes with their backup plans to their back-up plans, and often with no plan at all! When times are hard, when plans are disrupted, when life isn’t going quite how we hoped it would, what do we have? 

I’m sure that you, like me, have had many plans upended this past year. It’s been hard. I’ve been confused and disillusioned and disappointed sometimes this year. But we’re learning that despite our best efforts to control life, this is a normal part of being a human on planet earth. 

Most of life is improvisation. It’s how we relate to our friends and family after the mess explodes. It’s who we love, who we commit to, who we will do life with when nothing else makes sense. It’s how we’ll treat our colleagues and our employees and the marginalized and discouraged in our communities when they’re in chaos. It’s our next move when life’s gone off course. 

I have less and less confidence in plans any more, and more and more in character, presence, faithfulness, and courage.

Friends, God doesn’t want your life to go according to script. And God can’t make your life go according to plan – that’s not the kind of power God has. What God can do, though, is be with you with perspective, peace, and love wherever you are today or any day. And God can encourage you that if you seek to be a person of character – a person of valor like Ruth or Boaz – a decent, safe, loving person who commits to the kindest, most loving options in front of you in life… God can encourage you that you’re going to find power and joy in that. 

Secondly – Every moment, God is offering creative possibilities to us all.

We saw in the text that Naomi and Ruth and Boaz, while improvising their way through strange and hard times, each at different moments find themselves saying and doing brave and kind and good things that turn their lives toward the good, that open up good things in other people’s lives too.

And we asked – where do these ideas come from? How are these folks led to the words and actions that turn their lives toward the best possibilities for them and for others around them? 

My understanding, and I believe the best understanding of the Christian faith, is that these impulses, these ideas come from the Spirit of God, who is near to us all, and inviting us every day toward the best, most creative, most loving possibilities for us and for the rest of the world around us. Our future is not pre scripted by anyone, God included, but God is in relationship with everyone and everything God has made, inviting us all toward what’s most creative, delightful, redemptive, and loving. God is doing this pre consciously, or what we call subconsciously, the great majority of the time. 

We don’t spend most of our lives, like our Sunday prayer teams at church, consciously looking for a word from God, wondering what God’s best invitation is moment to moment. But on Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate that God is speaking to us even when we’re not looking for it. God’s Spirit is with us: inviting us, encouraging us not toward some crazy ideal that’s way out of reach, but to the very best possibility we have in any situation. 

So what do I do when I’ve been laid off? When my loved one gets ill? When I’ve been done wrong by the last person I expected that to come from? 

What happens when my dreams for my kid die? Or when I’m not where I want to be in life? Or when I’ve been a jerk to the person I love? Or when my mental health has tanked? Or when I’m just having a bad day?

None of these things, none of any of the things you’re facing today, are an out-of-reach, out-of-help place for the Spirit of God. Just as God is the wisest and most loving being in the universe, God is also the most creative and adaptive one, the one who’s always got an inkling of a possibility for what’s next. And if we really believe the Spirit is speaking, that notion is already kicking around your mind somewhere.

Spirit of God is present to you, and Spirit of God has spoken.

Our church’s Christian past, in what was called the Vineyard group of charismatic or renewalist churches, was famous for calling out to God, “Come, Holy Spirit,” and expecting cool things to happen.

But with all respect to that heritage, it’s a weird prayer, as the Holy Spirit is already here. Today we celebrate that the Spirit HAS COME. 

So we can pray instead: Spirit, I’m glad you’re here – what are you speaking? My God, what creative best is available right now?

And here’s one way we know which thoughts most connect us with God’s possibilities. By knowing what God loves and longs for for us all. 

Which is this:

Third – Spirit of God wants satisfaction, provision, life, joy for you – and for all God’s children – today. 

We see in both Ruth and Boaz aspects of the character and nature of God. Ruth in her loving loyalty, in her bold and disruptive and creative moves to bring about goodness and love and redemption. And Boaz in his self-giving love. And in Boaz’s earthy invitation to Ruth:

Whenever you are thirsty, go to the jugs of water and drink,

we hear a little echo, a little foretaste of the Spirit of God at Pentecost.

God has determined to not be God without us. 

Whenever we are thirsty for love, for meaning, for hope, God is eager to meet us. 

God has and is more than enough for us all. 

When we’re looking for the voice of God, wondering how God is inviting, speaking to us beneath our consciousness, we can ask what idea, what thought, what inclination holds the most promise of life, satisfaction, and joy – not just for me, but for me and others – and we may find ourselves moving towards God’s invitations.

And when we’re looking for the presence of God, wondering how to pray, how to know God is with us, we can take whoever or whatever brings satisfaction, provision, life, and joy to us or those around us, and see that or them as a way God is loving us, as a means through which God is stirring, as a sign of Spirit’s presence and goodness to us all.